Dakota Beacon

A lot of things can be true at once.  This is definitely the case with the shooting on Saturday of a young man, a nurse, who became entangled in the operation of ICE to apprehend an illegal alien in Minneapolis.  

First, we need to acknowledge the dismal state of affairs in general in the state of Minnesota and especially in the Twin Cities.  We have had the “leadership” of a thoroughly corrupt governor in Tim Walz, and that corruption has seeped into nearly every crevice of the capital and the administration.  The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is equally corrupt and has done everything he could find to impede the investigation of fraud and to prevent the apprehension of criminal, illegal aliens in the city.  This is the background for the latest tragic chapters in that troubled metropolis.  Frey’s wife is linked to, if not complicit in, the horrendous “Feed the Future” scandal.  No wonder he’s blocking everything.  A phone number posted for one of the fake “daycares”, when dialed, goes directly to the governor’s office.  It is truly a political and criminal cesspool.

When we have a climate this toxic, this compromised, there may be myriad hidden reasons for tin horn politicians shielding criminals of all kinds.  It used to be the Mafia.  Now it is Somalis and fellow travellers.   The behavior of local and state leadership lends credence to the worst speculations as to their implication in the mess.

Also true was the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is a member of MS-13 and an illegal alien from El Salvador,  involved in drug and human trafficking and whose wife had a protection order against him.  The man ICE was tracking down was one Jose Huerta Chuma, who is also an illegal alien with a record of domestic abuse, assault and assorted other crimes.  They were attempting to capture him and get him off the city’s streets when they were antagonistically accosted by members of the “ICE Watch” organization, a couple of women, who began hectoring them with shouting and loud whistles.  When asked to step back they refused, persisting in their hostile behavior and ultimately the tear gas came out and in the ensuing scuffle, a young man, Alex Pretti, a nurse by profession, who was filming the interaction on his cell phone, became embroiled in the affair and was shot and killed by an ICE officer.

Pretti was well within his rights filming the law enforcement officers, he was also carrying a gun legally.  That he had a gun and ammunition in no way defines him as a criminal or acting outside the law per se.  However, in his efforts to hassle the officers and at the same time “protect” or assist the women, the presence of the gun caused officers to react with a fatal outcome for Pretti.  All in all, a very sad situation.  If someone is particularly culpable in this it would seem that it would be the two women who egged on the officers and then got help from Pretti.  

Pretti was known as basically a nice guy.  The tragedy was that he involved himself foolishly in an organization devoted to preventing law enforcement officers from doing their job - which, honestly, is to make our cities safer by getting the violent criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers, along with the fraud network, off the streets and behind bars or deported.  Why would anyone not support that effort?  I mean, unless they were part of the web of crime.  

Also culpable are organizations that promote this anti-law activity.  ICE Watch is insane.  So are the professional nursing organizations which are allegedly promoting and encouraging this kind of activism.  

Our first and second amendment rights are precious.  An incident such as what happened on Saturday imperils these rights.  Is that one reason these organizations are so interested in stirring up violent “protests”?  Do they want to see a reaction against our rights?  Pretti had every right to protest and peacefully demonstrate as did the stupid women who got him killed.  He had every right to carry a gun and ammunition.  He had every right to film the officers.  

He apparently felt he had some duty to “defend” the obnoxious women - who were not innocent bystanders, but rather people interfering with the execution of the law and the apprehension of a potentially very dangerous criminal.  When you aid and abet a criminal in evading arrest you are committing a crime.  He was assisting or trying to assist these deranged women.

The officer who fired the shots that killed Pretti might well have exceeded the necessary degree of force.  The gun had been grabbed by another officer before the shots were fired at Pretti so he was technically unarmed.  He did not have his hand on his gun prior to being shot.  But we must remember that all of this scuffle and gun grab and firing of shots took place in less than 2 seconds.  We also need to remember how many people were in that dogpile.  There was confusion, shouting, whistles and disorder.  This is a recipe for disaster.  Sadly, the loser this time round was Alex Pretti.

Our incompetent DHS director, Kristi Noem, made another mistake of fact when she claimed that Pretti was “brandishing” his gun and threatening peace officers.  He wasn’t.  At least not in a physical way.  Perhaps he was abusing them verbally, but with the noise and confusion even that is hard to determine.  Her idiotic statement based on her ignorance of the matter, feeds into anti-Second Amendment threats constantly fomented by the left.  It also leads to fundamental distrust of the authorities, which is part of the whole problem.  It is always good advice to Noem to keep her mouth shut.  She never makes the effort to learn the facts.  This is just one more example.  And it might have been somewhat more becoming to refer to the loss of a young man in his prime, however mistaken he might have been.

There is no excuse for the behavior and speeches of Walz or Frey.  Or the Chief of Police of Minneapolis.  Calling on ICE to leave the city is evidence of their complicity in wrongdoing.  It is also the kind of rhetoric that provokes the kind of confrontations that result in death and injury of citizens and/or law enforcement personnel.  What good can this possibly do?  Maybe it can also encourage more crime.

I remember my dad referring often to Longfellow’s quote, “Of what had been and might have been (and who was changed and who was dead)," and it seems poignantly appropriate in this case.  

A couple of misguided women who must now live with what they caused, an officer who must live with and defend his precipitate action, of a well-meaning young man with a good reputation and a good career who is no more, a dangerous criminal who escaped capture to commit who knows what future atrocity before he is done with us, perhaps a life lost to that failure to capture him.  All because people are being used as cat’s paws for sinister entities who want these results and don’t pay the price themselves.  Most of these mobs are just pawns.  We have seen them before - in Russia in 1917, in China in 1966, in Iran in 1979.  They use people - ill-informed people driven more by sentiment than common sense - to achieve ends we will all regret should they be successful.  

We need to have a thorough investigation by, if possible, an agency not involved in this shooting so as to regain the confidence of the people.  If we don’t we will see a falling away of support.  No one will believe that ICE can investigate itself.  As to the state and local governments, they are a write-off.  Worse, they are an impediment.  We should all try not to jump to our conclusions or prejudge the events of Saturday.  We can all agree that they were tragic in the outcome.

Where local government has seen ICE and the FBI as allies against crime and embraced their involvement, the result has been beneficial.  Memphis is one example.  Crime was so out of control that no one there could believe it would ever be curbed.  I can cite personal knowledge of the effects of violent crime - a friend was shot and killed while working as a security guard there, a cousin finally sold his house due to the drive-by shootings in his once quiet neighborhood, an aunt was mugged in a supermarket parking lot in broad daylight.  And those are just people I know intimately.  Now crime is said to be down by 75% according to my family there.  This could have been the case in Minneapolis but for the fact that corruption is on such a massive scale that the people in charge there could not cooperate without putting themselves under too much scrutiny.  

I have said this many times before.  In a cynical world such as we live in, where people have become inured to corruption, calloused as to its results, character does matter in the end.