How We Bear Witness to the Siege of Minneapolis
By Lily Wass
How We Bear Witness to the Siege of Minneapolis
Caring about issues through your smartphone risks the paradoxical effect of numbing our senses to the horrors we are attempting to, amidst all the noise, keep an eye on. Other side effects include paralysis from the shock, followed by potential whiplash if the next short video is disconcertingly unrelated to what was just witnessed. But we cannot get used to watching people die from our phones, not after what those who hit record are sacrificing to reach us.
Less than a month into the new year, Americans have borne digital witness to the murders of two fellow citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti, that took place roughly a mile apart in Minneapolis. These deaths are in addition to the underreported but deadly shootings of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez in Chicago and Keith Porter Jr. in Los Angeles, and the record high number of lives lost within the walls of immigration detention centers. Though out of sight from the cameras, many of these deaths point towards preventable causes, including the denial of lifesaving medical intervention and homicide by law enforcement agents. On and off screen, maximum cruelty is being brandished again and again.
Here we are in the same city, watching events that transpired so fast bystanders were able to document the full events in a single take. When these videos first hit our social media feeds, they’re almost perfectly contained within the attention span of short-form content. What we must articulate is how they are holding our gaze.
In conclusive digital detail, what Alex Pretti brandished moments before he was killed was not a gun but a camera. He was not alone. The video that many of us watched the murder play out in came from someone else filming just a few feet away. We see their thick down coat and pink scarf in the bottom half of the screen while Pretti’s alive, before the point of view swings down to the sidewalk as the recorder runs backwards away from the live fire. Their screams become our screams. The last frame shows us that right there, still just feet away, is Pretti’s body lying in the street, the agents that frenetically circled him seconds ago now scattered off to the side.
In the first year of Trump’s second term, media has become a site for the administration to flood users with dizzying hallucinations. In all caps and no word limits, federal pages are filled with claims of the victories: tax breaks, reduced prices, murders down 20% thanks to the “peacemakers,” with no sources cited. We’re inundated with slogans of hubris and absurdity, like the “The One, Big, Beautiful, Bill,” or “The Gulf of America,” that we give power to even when trying to speak out against them, because we’re forced to engage with the rhetoric of delusion. In trying to grab hold and dissect the mechanics of one lie, another shock comes through the screen, sweeping us into directionless confusion.
Then comes Minneapolis, whose citizen reporting hands us something that we can identify as real testimony to what life in America is like right now. The videos taken by people like us capture fear, so much fear, and proof that all of this violence is for naught—that there is a campaign to take away our neighbors and it does nothing to address the cost-of-living crisis that really looms large over daily life. When Minneapolis residents hear the whistles that signal ICE is near, they are going out and hitting record. This is what presumably lead both Good and Pretti to be where they were when they were shot dead: to bear witness in the hopeful direction of justice.
For the second time in weeks, the shaky recordings of someone who just happened to be there have become a decisive catalyst for how national and international audiences process the reality of the United States. This cycle echoes how Palestinians in Gaza became reporters of their own genocide, forced to create the proof of their systematic annihilation with a cellphone camera held up to the bombs. They document regardless of whether Western media and governments acknowledge their existences or their deaths. The truth is right there, just pixels away.
Our ability to tell the truth about an administration that’s married itself to lies is a threat to those in power; officials admit this when they lie all the more blatantly. On the below freezing streets of Minneapolis that observers brave, what ICE agents are brutally enforcing is the Department of Homeland Security’s false narrative that documenting their operations is a punishable offense in and of itself. People have been detained, once again in the span of minutes, for sitting in their cars—not obstructing ICE vehicles—or looking on from the sidewalk. Like the detainments of Palestinian activists in the United States, these legal observers are not charged with a crime, but are nonetheless subjected to unbridled punishment: fists, pepper spray, and confinement in a cell, sometimes far, far away from their state of origin. Pretti and Good’s deaths signal that, like the Israeli military’s repeated targeting of Palestinian journalists, witnessing state violence can also be punishable by death.
Authoritarianism cannot make itself clearer than by killing those who record the open secrets of how it functions—openly wielding the state’s ability to manufacture a crime out of innocence.
To echo the sentiments of educator Kahlil Greene, the Black Lives Matter movement teaches us that there is no such thing as the last straw, no execution of a victim so innocent that it evades justifications by the powers of state violence. Even watching it occur in perfect, digital detail will not save us from the fabrications—whether it be defamation of the victim’s identity or manufacture of sympathy for the assailants. Both were rolled out within hours of Good and Pretti’s deaths, marked by the repeated, unquantified accusation of “domestic terrorism.”
Openly brandishing their toys of manipulation, The White House also shared a doctored photo of an arrested activist from the city, her skin darkened and facial expression altered from neutral to crying. When called out, their response was: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” In the war for our attention, bigotry is always only ever humorous while calling for the justice of immigrants, Palestinians, trans people, and other victims of the state is flagged as terrorism. Minneapolis’s ability to break through that muddle, the perpetual unalignment of what we see and what we’re told, is a strike of urgent, devasting clarity—a call to action that must be named, then heeded.
Right now, Minneapolis residents say that it’s even worse than what their clips show. What those of us outside the city do know is that there are abandoned cars along the streets, their engines sometimes left running in the haste of the driver’s detainment by immigration enforcement. We’ve seen a grandfather pulled from his home at gunpoint to walk through the snow in his underwear, and a five-year-old detained after returning home from pre-school. Another man and his two-year-old daughter were taken by ICE and sent to Texas on the same day, despite a judge’s order to immediately release the toddler. The judge actually had to pen the words: “Needless to say, she has no criminal history.”
From the triage of observer videos, we must too bear witness. Watch the ICE agent pull the gun from his holster, then hear the first bullet, the second, the third. At least 10 shots ring out, as the officer aims at Pretti’s already still body. The bar at the bottom of the screen shows only a minute has elapsed, brief enough for us to hold our breath while Pretti went from trying to lift his fellow citizen up from the ground while the masked figures launched pepper spray, to crossing into the realm of martyrdom.
Understand that if a person’s sheer existence is a threat to the instruments of authority, we are operating in a failed state.