Renee Nicole Good is dead. A 37-year-old mother of three, a U.S. citizen, a legal observer standing where the government prefers citizens not to stand: close enough to watch. That should be the starting point for every conversation about what happened in Minneapolis this week.
Instead, the starting point has become the frame.
The White House and Homeland Security call it domestic terrorism. In their telling, Good “attempted to run over federal agents” with her car, forcing a split-second act of self-defense. The narrative is tidy: a dangerous actor, a weaponized vehicle, brave officers making a terrible but necessary choice. Case closed.
Local officials and many who watched the videos say that story falls apart the second you hit play. They describe Good as a legal observer boxed in by agents, trying to leave when one officer stepped aside and fired three shots into her vehicle. In that version, the danger runs in the opposite direction. The people with badges and guns created the threat and then responded to it.
Both stories cannot be equally true. But both are equally professional. Both are crafted. Both are framed.
This is where framing bias stops being an abstract concept and starts becoming a matter of life and death. Facts exist: three bullets, one dead mother, a car that moved, an agent who fired, videos from multiple angles. Yet what most people will carry away is not those facts, but a story built around them. The frame tells you who is dangerous, who is sympathetic, who is rational, who is disposable.
If you lean conservative, you probably didn’t need to see the video before forming an opinion. “ICE agent,” “vehicle moved toward an officer,” “domestic terrorism”: those phrases slot neatly into an existing mental file labeled “justified use of force.” If you lean liberal, “innocent mother,” “legal observer,” and “surrounded by agents” likely sent the folder labeled “abuse of power” sliding open in your head. The same incident, instantly sorted into opposite verdicts.
That is not an accident. That is framing.
The federal frame shows you an agent in imminent danger. It hides the fact that Good was not wanted for any crime and that agents chose to surround her car. It glosses over the decision to escalate a confrontation with a citizen whose primary offense appears to have been pointing her attention in the wrong direction. It leans hard on the language of threat, chaos, and terrorism because those words soften the horror of shooting a woman who did not need to die.
The local frame shows you an innocent woman killed for trying to leave a frightening situation. It hides, or at least minimizes, the reality that in tense, uncertain moments, officers do sometimes face real threats from vehicles and do sometimes have to make fast judgments with imperfect information. It leans hard on motherhood, citizenship, and legality because those words sharpen the moral outrage.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: both frames are doing a kind of work. Both are trying to make an intolerable event feel tolerable to their respective audiences. One does it by enlarging the threat. The other does it by enlarging the injustice. Neither is simply “the facts.”
The problem is not that people use frames; human beings cannot function without them. The problem is that we rarely admit we are using them. We talk as if our preferred narrative is reality itself and the other side is delusional, evil, or both. When we do that, we stop being curious about what actually happened and start hunting for ammunition to defend the story we already like.
In Good’s case, that has consequences far beyond social media arguments. Her children will grow up inside one of these frames. In one, their mother was a domestic terrorist, killed in a legitimate act of defense by the state. In the other, she was an innocent citizen, killed for daring to watch the state too closely. Those are not just different stories; they are different countries.
The agent who pulled the trigger will also need a frame to survive his own memories. Maybe he tells himself he had no choice, that any hesitation might have gotten someone killed. Maybe, in quieter moments, he wonders if he fired too quickly, if the danger felt in that instant matches the reality captured on video. The story he settles on will not change the facts, but it will decide whether he sees himself as protector, perpetrator, or a shifting combination of both.
What should terrify us is how quickly the public conversation calcifies around these frames and how slowly we demand anything more rigorous than a press conference and a hashtag. There will be investigations, statements, leaks, counter-leaks. There will be meticulously worded reports designed to sound like neutral truth while carefully avoiding certain words and centering others. By the time an official conclusion arrives, most people will have stopped paying attention. Their minds will have been made up by the first frame they stepped into.
This is exactly the kind of cognitive trap explored in Won’t Get Fooled Again: How to See Through Lies, Biases, and Bad Arguments, which looks at how framing, selective language, and emotional cues can shape our perception of events long before evidence has been fully gathered or understood. The same mechanisms that drive political spin in Washington are at work here, nudging people toward certainty they have not earned and outrage they have not examined.
If you want to test your own frame, there is now a BBC News video that walks through the shooting frame by frame, slowing the footage, highlighting key moments, and placing them in sequence. It does not tell you what to think as much as it shows you what happened and leaves you to confront your own instincts: watch it, and make up your own mind.
It does not have to be this way. A minimally responsible public response would start with a different set of instincts:
- Assume your first reaction is heavily framed by your politics and media diet.
- Actively seek out the strongest version of the other side’s account, not the easiest to mock.
- Separate what is on the video and in the physical evidence from the adjectives wrapped around those images.
This does not mean pretending both sides are equally right. It means refusing to confuse your preferred story with objective reality. Truth exists, but it is usually harder, messier, and more uncomfortable than the frames built to contain it.
Right now, three children are growing up without their mother. That fact does not care which story wins. It does not care whether the press release says “terrorism” or “murder,” “officer-involved shooting” or “brazen killing.” It is the one part of this event that cannot be spun into something less devastating.
Everything else—the justification, the blame, the lessons we claim to learn or refuse to learn—will depend on whose frame we step into and whether we ever have the courage to step back out.
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