If you’ve watched the Alex Pretti shooting videos and believe that what you saw can only be explained as an act of cold-blooded murder, you’re probably not watching closely enough.
Let’s start at the beginning. This time, pay attention to the agent who ultimately shoots Pretti. For the sake of clarity, we’ll call him Agent 1. When Agent 1 first arrives on the scene, his initial focus isn’t on Pretti at all. Rather, Agent 1 immediately concerns himself with a separate interaction involving a female protester. The videos show that he places himself between the two interactions, with his body facing away from the Pretti scrum and turned toward the female protester.
He does not fully turn his attention to the Pretti skirmish until fewer than ten seconds before the shooting. He appears to do so at roughly the same moment that, according to subtitles provided in a New York Times analysis, another agent started yelling, “Gun! He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”
At this point, Agent 1 is standing above the fray, looking down over Pretti’s back, as Pretti — on his hands and knees — struggles with at least three other agents who are trying to force him into a prone position.
Right underneath Agent 1, a fifth agent, in a gray coat, reaches down to Pretti’s lower back area and removes a gun from a now exposed holster.
To our eyes, and in slowed-down footage, when the gray-coated agent’s actions are highlighted, this fact may now seem obvious.
But it’s not at all clear that Agent 1, who was still orienting himself to the chaotic scene unfolding before him and reacting to fellow agents’ yelling “Gun! Gun! Gun!,” saw the grey-coated agent remove Pretti’s gun. It’s not even clear that he saw Pretti had a holster on his back hip at all.
Instead, Agent 1 during these few seconds seems focused at a point somewhere beyond Pretti’s back, on the movements of the many hands and legs tussling underneath him. This makes sense — Agent 1 likely has little context for what led to the tussling. He just knows that his fellow agents in the pile of moving limbs are yelling about a gun, and if there is a gun out there, the most dangerous place for it to be is anywhere in or near the hands of an apparently noncompliant suspect.
It’s only at this moment, with cries of “Gun! Gun! Gun!” still raining down, that Agent 1 first reaches for his own holstered sidearm.
The question is: Why now? What might have caused this reaction from Agent 1?
Sure, one possible explanation is that Agent 1 saw the gray-coated agent take away Pretti’s firearm and thought to himself, “Great! Now I can shoot an unarmed man in broad daylight with a bunch of witnesses!”
If you’re predisposed to believing that federal immigration agents are the scum of the earth, you probably suspect that this is exactly the sort of thing a jackbooted thug would do.
Possible, too, is another apparently common conclusion that Agent 1 was poorly trained and panicked for no discernible reason, shooting Pretti multiple times despite his empty hands being clearly displayed on the ground.
But consider another possibility: Pretti’s hands were never empty.
Check the footage again.
If Pretti’s hands are so clearly empty, why, when you look at the still frames of the moments after Pretti is shot, do you clearly see that his flailing right hand is, in fact, clutching his phone?
Now, obviously, a phone is not a gun.
But choose to believe for just a moment that federal immigration agents are rational beings with an ounce of humanity inside them. Isn’t it possible — indeed, even probable — that Agent 1 reached for his own gun because, while looking down over a scrum of four people, one of whom he had reason to believe was an armed suspect, he finally caught a glimpse of Pretti’s right hand, grasping a dark object about 5 or 6 inches in length?
And that, with someone still yelling “Gun! Gun! Gun!,” Agent 1 mistakenly — but perhaps, under the circumstances, not unreasonably — interpreted Pretti’s actions to be consistent with someone struggling over control of a firearm on the ground, then fighting to get his body upright while holding a gun?
That maybe, at this point, for the first time, he perceives (not just sees but really registers) that Pretti has a holster on his back, which is now empty? That this, in turn, solidifies the narrative rapidly forming in Agent 1’s brain about what’s happening and how much danger he and others might be in if Pretti successfully gets to his knees?
We, of course, now know that Pretti never had a gun in his hand. We know that he’d been pepper-sprayed in the face and that it was just as likely that his fight to get to his knees was an unconscious reaction to reach for his face as it was an attempt to forcefully resist arrest. We know that he objectively, in that moment, posed no imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officers.
But, again, be honest — how many times did you have to watch, and from how many different camera angles, to figure out which agent even fired the first shot? How many views of stabilized slow-motion footage did you need to see to confirm that the grey-coated agent took Pretti’s gun before Agent 1 opened fire? Did you need subtitles to first realize that Agent 1 turned around in response to cries of “Gun! He’s got a gun!,” or did you eventually register that with your audio turned down to dampen the whistle shrills?
Agent 1 didn’t have those camera angles. He couldn’t freeze time, or rewind footage, or analyze the situation from multiple viewpoints. He certainly didn’t have the benefit of doing his real-time analysis with sound on low so that he could focus on what the hell was going on.
Is it possible that Agent 1, in the circumstances as they existed for him at the time and relying on his very human brain to process a lot of information under high levels of stress, drew conclusions that were objectively wrong — yet not objectively unreasonable?
I fear that, for many, this question is nothing but a political Rorschach test.
It doesn’t have to be one for you.