The Diagnosis Is the Defense: Minneapolis and the Psychopathy of State Violence

Minneapolis Police recovered 900 guns and arrested hundreds of violent offenders last year without firing a single shot. Then federal agents arrived. Three weeks. Three shootings. Two American citizens dead. The violence is not a failure of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed.

PRE-ORDER

Let me be precise about what we are witnessing.

On January 7, 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old American woman, as her vehicle passed him on a Minneapolis street. Federal officials claimed self-defense. They said Good had weaponized her SUV to run over an agent. They said the agent was recovering in a hospital. Video footage showed otherwise. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey watched the same video and said publicly: “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.”

On January 24, 2026, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, while he was filming them with his phone and attempting to help a woman they had pushed to the ground. Six agents surrounded him. They pepper-sprayed him. They wrestled him face-down onto the pavement. They shot him in the back. Federal officials called him a “domestic terrorist” who had arrived to “massacre” officers. Bystander video showed a man holding a phone. Nothing else.

Both victims were 37 years old. Both were American citizens. Both had no criminal records. Both were killed within seventeen days of each other by federal agents operating in the same city.

This is not a policy failure. This is a diagnosis.

The Data That Exposes the Lie

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said something on January 25, 2026, that every American should hear:

“The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone. And now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks.”

Read that again.

Nine hundred firearms recovered. Hundreds of violent offenders arrested. Zero shots fired by Minneapolis police. The entire year of 2025.

Then 3,000 federal agents flood the city as part of what DHS called “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever.” In three weeks, they shoot three people and kill two American citizens.

Two of the three homicides in Minneapolis so far in 2026 were committed by federal immigration enforcement agents.

The police chief was not speculating. He was presenting evidence. The Minneapolis Police Department documented its own record of de-escalation while federal agents documented their addiction to lethal force.

This is not a difference in training. This is a difference in purpose.

The Psychology of the Defense

What happened after each killing is as diagnostic as the killings themselves.

Within hours of Renée Good’s death, federal officials constructed a narrative: she had “weaponized her SUV” to run over an agent. The agent, they said, was recovering in a hospital. Video evidence contradicted every element of this account. When the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension attempted to investigate, the FBI revoked their access.

Within hours of Alex Pretti’s death, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called him a “domestic terrorist.” Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti had arrived at the scene “to inflict maximum damage” and intended to “massacre” federal agents. Multiple bystander videos showed a man in street clothes holding a cell phone. Bovino has since been relieved of his command.

This pattern—immediate narrative construction, victim demonization, evidence suppression—is not improvisation. It is reflex. It is the institutional expression of what I have documented clinically as the Psycho-Cognitive Defense Mechanisms of Whiteness: Denial, Defensiveness, Deflection, and Dissociation.

Denial: The immediate rejection of video evidence that contradicts the official account. Border Patrol Commander Bovino said publicly: “The victims are the Border Patrol agents. The suspect put himself in that situation.” The agents who shot an unarmed man in the back are framed as the injured party.

Defensiveness: The emotional fragility that transforms any critique into an attack on the entire institution. When Minneapolis officials demanded accountability, federal officials accused local leaders of “obstructing” law enforcement and enabling “domestic terrorism.”

Deflection: The strategic redirection of accountability. The man who was holding a phone becomes a “domestic terrorist.” The woman driving away becomes a “weapon.” The victims are transformed into perpetrators. The perpetrators are transformed into victims.

Dissociation: The psychic detachment that allows officials to watch video of a man being shot in the back while face-down on the ground and describe it as “a split-second decision” made in “a complicated, violent situation.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche used those exact words on national television. The gap between what the video shows and what the official describes is the space where dissociation lives.

The diagnosis is not metaphorical. It is clinical.

The Pattern Is 400 Years Old

Every slave patrol in the antebellum South operated under the same logic: Black presence in white space is inherently threatening. The patrol existed not to respond to crime but to control movement—to enforce the boundaries of who belonged where and under what conditions.

Every lynch mob in the Jim Crow era justified its violence with the same defense: we were protecting ourselves. The mobs did not see themselves as murderers. They saw themselves as guardians of order—responding to a threat that existed only in their imagination and their projection.

Every police shooting of an unarmed Black person in modern America follows the same script: the officer “feared for their life.” The fear is always asserted. The threat is rarely proven. The victim is always transformed, retroactively, into someone who deserved what happened.

The language changes. The mechanism does not.

In Minneapolis, the federal government has deployed the largest immigration enforcement operation in American history. The stated target was undocumented immigrants. The actual casualties include two American citizens with no criminal records, shot dead in their own city by agents who arrived from out of state.

An eyewitness to Renée Good’s killing told reporters: “People in our neighborhood have been terrorized by ICE for six weeks.”

Terrorized. That is the word she used. Not protected. Not served. Terrorized.

When the institution designed to protect you becomes the institution that kills you, and when the killing is immediately defended as justified regardless of evidence, you are not living under law enforcement. You are living under occupation.

The Projection Reveals the Pathology

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”

Consider what the evidence actually shows: a man filming federal agents with his phone. A man who stepped forward to help a woman who had been pushed to the ground. A man who was pepper-sprayed, tackled by six agents, pinned face-down, and shot in the back.

Now consider what the word “terrorist” actually means: someone who uses violence or the threat of violence to instill fear in a population for political purposes.

Who, in this scenario, instilled terror? The man with the phone? Or the agents who shot him?

This is what I call White Projection: the compulsive need to externalize one’s own guilt, violence, and pathology onto others, thereby preserving the illusion of moral purity. The agents who terrorized a neighborhood for six weeks, who shot two unarmed citizens, who blocked state investigators from accessing evidence—they are not called terrorists.

The man holding a phone is.

The projection is the confession. When they call him a terrorist, they are describing themselves.

Diagnosis Without Treatment Is Cruelty

I have spent more than fifteen years training professionals at major health systems, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies on the dynamics of institutional racism. I have served as an expert witness in cases involving institutional discrimination. I have documented, across two books and hundreds of hours of training, the precise mechanisms by which white supremacy operates through American institutions.

What is happening in Minneapolis is not new. It is simply visible.

The question is not whether these killings were legal. The law has always accommodated state violence against those it deems disposable. The question is whether we are willing to name the pathology and demand treatment.

Treatment does not look like a “full and impartial investigation” conducted by the same agencies that committed the violence. Treatment does not look like the resignation of one commander while the policy that enabled him remains intact. Treatment does not look like “de-escalation”—President Trump’s word—without accountability.

Treatment looks like reckoning: the honest acknowledgment that the system is producing exactly the outcomes it was designed to produce.

Treatment looks like repair: structural change that shifts power, resources, and authority away from institutions that have demonstrated their incapacity for restraint.

Treatment looks like negotiation: the ongoing surrender of unearned dominance to stabilize a new equilibrium rooted in justice rather than control.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara provided the evidence. Nine hundred guns. Hundreds of arrests. Zero shots fired. He proved that de-escalation is possible. He proved that law enforcement does not require lethal force. He proved that the federal agents who killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti made a choice—not an inevitable one, but a pathological one.

The defense is always the same: We feared for our lives. We had to act. It was a split-second decision.

The diagnosis is always the same: The fear is the disorder. The violence is the symptom. The defense is the disease.

Believe what they do, not what they call it.

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Dante King is a historian, legal expert witness, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medical Education at Mayo Clinic. He has trained over 20,000 professionals at Stanford Medicine, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, SFPD, and Fortune 500 companies. His award-winning Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness reached #1 on Amazon New Releases. He is the founder of Blackademics, a nonprofit dedicated to racial justice education.

The framework in this essay — Denial, Defensiveness, Deflection, Dissociation — comes from his forthcoming book, The Psychopathy of Whiteness. Foreword by Dr. Robin DiAngelo. February 24, 2026.

PRE-ORDER

→ Pre-Order: The Psychopathy of Whiteness provides the clinical framework for diagnosing and treating the pathology documented in this essay. Available February 24, 2026.

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