Per the media interview with the ICE department (linked upthread), he said that civilians should not interfere with the duties of federal officers. Observing is fine, taking video is fine. In both of these screen shots, it does not look like a friendly conversation. In my opinion, it looks like a confrontation.
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Uit de video's en ooggetuigenverslagen blijkt dat Pretti geen wapen in zijn handen hield, maar juist een telefoon. Deze feiten staan haaks op uitspraken van de federale overheid.
nos.nl
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There's no question that excessive force was used, but it doesn't appear to start with excessive force. It appears to start with confrontations between protesters and ICE agents.
Like others have mentioned,
@otto, I also sincerely appreciate your measured efforts to analyze/interpret the various video images. I hope federal investigators will be as thorough, but we don't know for a fact yet that there will be any investigation, or by whom.
We know that the killing of Mr. Pretti occured in front of a donut shop. After the "target" the pack of agents were seeking entered thhe shop and the door was locked behind him, the agents - apparently unwilling to break through a locked door in pursuit of their target - seem to have been milling about, waiting on who knows what. It was brutally cold, noisey with whistles and protestors, and their target had easily eluded them.
Personally, I have no problem imaging observers/protestors yelling something like, "Go home, get out of here, eff you," etc. Maybe the woman in the white coat did just that. If the agent who you think might have engaged with her did in fact do that, they didn't have to. As the saying goes, "Nod, smile, and back away." They certainly did not have to reply to her, nor aggressively shove her so hard that she fell.
IMO, the loss of situational control by the agents is evident then, even before Mr. Pretti is involved. He could not have realized what chaos he was stepping into. We film things with our phone and we're really not even seeing what we're filming because we're looking at what we're filming and also looking at the phone we're filming it with.
JMO, Mr. Pretti sees that two women seem to be on the receiving end of aggressive, possibly hostile actions being committed by masked agents. Alarmed, maybe appalled, and still filming, he steps into the scene, approaching the woman in the white coat seconds before she is shoved to the ground and then reaching out immediately to try to help her up. His efforts are thwarted by agents putting shoving him, pepper spraying him and knocking him to his hands and knees. Shocked as, IMO, he must have been, I believe he had no notion that he would be shot in the next seconds.
There were other actions available to these agents, if they understood their training. If they were "intimidated" or "felt threatened" by the two women and, later, the one man, they could have verbally de-escalated things, physically pulled back a few steps, or even snapped into teams and detained all three with handcuffs/zipties, something.
No scenarios that I can conceive of explain, rationalize or justify what we all saw happen next. A man already on the ground was shot in the back, and then shot multiple more times. That's a crime.
The murder of Alex Pretti is a crime. How it will get solved, when it will get solved, and what justice will be visited upon the perpetrator/s is what matters now.
I am so frightened that it may never come.
www.bbc.co.uk
