Five years ago, video images from a Minneapolis street showing a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as his life slipped away ignited a social movement.
Now, videos from another Minneapolis street showing the last moments of Renee Good’s life are central to another debate about law enforcement in America. They’ve slipped out day by day since ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Good last Wednesday in her maroon SUV. Yet compared to 2020, the story these pictures tell is murkier, subject to manipulation both within the image itself and the way it is interpreted.
This time, too, the Trump administration and its supporters went to work establishing their own public view of the event before the inevitable imagery appeared.
But half a decade later, so many things are not the same — from cultural attitudes to rapidly evolving technology around all kinds of imagery.
“We are in a different time,” said Francesca Dillman Carpentier, a University of North Carolina journalism professor and expert on the media’s impact on audiences.
Imagery can change attitudes
No one who saw the searing video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes on May 25, 2020, is likely to forget it — and Chauvin’s impassive face Floyd insisted he couldn’t breathe. United in revulsion, demonstrators began one of the nation’s largest-ever social movements.
The footage “caused many individuals to experience an epiphany about racism, specifically cultural racism, in the United States,” legal scholar Angela Onwuachi-Willig wrote in a Houston Law Review study that examined whether white Americans experienced a collective cultural trauma.
She ultimately concluded that didn’t happen and that the impact diminished with time. The rollback of diversity programs with the second Trump administration offers evidence for her argument.
“The people who are writing the cultural narrative of the Good shooting took notes from the Floyd killing and are managing this narrative differently,” said Kelly McBride, an expert on media ethics for the Poynter Institute.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good, who was demonstrating in opposition to ICE enforcement of immigration laws, a domestic terrorist — an interpretation that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey dismissed with an expletive.
Both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance suggested the shooting was justified because Good was allegedly attempting to run Ross down with her vehicle.
On the night of the incident, White House border czar Tom Homan was cautious in an interview with the “CBS Evening News,” when anchor Tony Dokoupil showed him the most widely distributed video of the incident, recorded by a bystander. The veteran law enforcement official said it would be unprofessional for him to prejudge before an investigation.
Later that evening, Homan issued a statement calling the shooting “another example of the results of the hateful rhetoric and violent attacks” against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers.
Video allows both sides to interpret
Video of the incident has been generally inconclusive about whether Good’s vehicle actually hit Ross before he opened fire. Even if she did, many experts question whether that represented grounds for firing his weapon.
“These ICE videos do present irrefutable facts — a woman drove her car and then she was shot dead by an ICE agent,” said Duy Linh Tu, a documentarian and professor at Columbia University’s journalism school. “What the videos can’t show is the intent of the woman or the officer. And that’s the tricky part.”
Good, obviously, can’t speak to what motivated her actions that day.
Several news organizations have carefully examined the forensic evidence that has emerged. The Associated Press noted that it was unclear if Good’s car made contact with Ross. The Washington Post reported that “videos examined by The Post, including one shared on Truth Social by Trump, do not clearly show whether the agent is struck or how close the front of the vehicle comes to striking him.”
The New York Times stated that “in one video, it looks like the agent is being struck by the SUV. But when we synchronize it with the first clip, we can see the agent is not being run over.”
Video that emerged Friday from the Minnesota site Alpha News showed the incident from Ross’ perspective, leaving many questions unanswered amid public speculation.
Vance linked to this video online and claimed, “Many of you have been told this law enforcement officer wasn’t hit by a car, wasn’t being harassed and murdered an innocent woman. The reality is that his life was endangered, and he fired in self-defense.”
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer wrote online that “how could anyone on the planet watch this video and conclude what JD Vance says?” Schumer asserted the administration “is lying to you.”
Do more angles provide more clarity?
When one commentator claimed that Good did not deserve to be shot, conservative media figure Megyn Kelly responded that “Yes, she did. She hit and almost ran over a cop.”
Poynter’s McBride stated that the media has generally performed well in detailing the evidence circulating among the public, but the administration has also effectively spread its interpretation.
Despite having more camera angles now than during the Floyd incident, some experts remain cautious, noting that “I don’t know if that adds clarity or more fog to this case,” according to Tu. “People will see what they want to see, often picking the angle that aligns with their existing beliefs.”
This uncertainty rooted in the emerging videos leads experts like Tu and Carpentier to conclude that their impact will be less significant compared to the Floyd case. Society is becoming increasingly desensitized to images of violence — a trend highlighted by the online spread of footage showing Republican activist Charlie Cook.
Moreover, the rise of AI-generated fake imagery is conditioning the public to doubt what they see. Prior to Ross's identification, BBC Verify pointed out the circulation of false images depicting what the masked agent supposedly looked like, as well as misleading videos of a Minneapolis demonstration.
“Now you can’t believe what you’re seeing,” Carpentier stated. “You don’t know if what you’re seeing is the real video or if it has been doctored, and I don’t think AI is being a friend in this case at all.”
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