Keith Porter is not Renee Good
Don't discredit the anti-ICE movement by conflating them
On New Year’s Eve in LA, African-American man Keith Porter was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent. Some have compared this to the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, and wondered why the white woman’s death has attractted much more attention than the black man’s. But the cases could not be more different.
Where Good was at most engaged in non-violent protest, Porter was firing a rifle into the air — a means of “celebrating” the New Year that some extremely ignorant or selfish people do and which kills people every year. In LA firing a gun into the air can result in felony changes, and rightly so.
There is not any question that Porter was shooting. His own family admits he was armed and shooting. Their attorney doesn’t dispute that Porter had a rifle, and admits that one witness heard someone demand Porter “put down the rifle” more than once.
An off-duty ICE agent was responded to the situation, what ICE spox have dramatically if accurately called an “active shooter”, and a confrontation ensued. Exactly what happened at that point is murky. It is possible, given the lack of detailed information available, that the ICE agent overreacted; it is also possible that Porter threatened him with the rifle and he legitimately used deadly force.
But in either case we have a very different incident than the murder of unarmed Renee Good as she attempted to leave the scene of a confrontation with ICE agents.