A verdict ahead of the footage

One · What happened

Two accounts of the same few seconds

The Associated Press reported that Marcos Charles, a senior ICE official, said officers used their vehicles to block the man and that he accelerated toward them. Charles said the officers feared for their own lives and for the public. The man had been convicted of larceny and sentenced last year to five years of probation, according to Charles. He had also evaded officers in September when they tried to arrest him for deportation. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the agents did not know the boy was in the car and that the father “was aware” of him.

Al Jazeera reported New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s version of the sequence. In her account the man was pulling into a parking space when a federal officer in plain clothes approached with a gun drawn, followed by a second officer who was also out of uniform. The man then began to pull the car forward. At least one officer fired seven rounds at the car, and one struck him just under the left ear. The boy was unharmed and with a relative, according to Tisch.

CBS New York reported that on 9 October the city police posted video from the body cameras of the first two officers to reach the scene. The video shows the man sitting on the ground and then being driven to a hospital by officers who had arrived after the shooting. The shooting itself is not in it. Mullin confirmed that the federal officers’ body cameras were recording, the Associated Press reported. He did not say when that footage would be released.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul have called for a halt to immigration enforcement in the city, Al Jazeera reported. Mullin answered that the officers are “enforcing our nation’s laws.” Whether the shooting shows a dangerous policy or a lawful arrest is a question for the investigators and the courts. DHS said the incident remains under investigation, according to Al Jazeera. Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said her investigation would be “guided by the evidence and the law,” CBS New York reported.

Two · What it is doing

The verdict that does not wait for the video

Open a phone this weekend and a post about the shooting will likely carry its verdict in the first line. A reader with a relative in uniform sees a car moving toward men on foot. Charles’s account reads to him as plain sense. His anger goes to the officials who want that kind of work halted. A second reader sees a five-year-old in the back seat of a car that a stranger with a gun has walked up to. Tisch’s account of a gun drawn on a parked car is the whole story to him, and his anger lands on the agency and on whoever defends it.

“So we can establish the facts and get to the truth,” Hochul said of the footage, according to Al Jazeera. A reader on either side shares that wish, along with the wait it brings. Each of the two has a reason worth respecting. A five-year-old was in that car, and an officer who sees a car move toward him has reason to be afraid. The two reasons sit side by side without trouble. Trouble starts when one of them is asked to settle the facts. As of 9 October the recording of the shooting itself, the one thing that could settle them, had not been released.

Anger turns up on the first day with nothing to land on. Nothing on the record yet says whose fault the shot was, and nothing will until the recordings are out. The quickest way to give an anger somewhere to land is to decide. Because a real feeling stands behind it, the decision passes for honesty with the man who makes it. After that each new fact gets sorted. The seven rounds go on one pile or the other. Both sides read the video of the aftermath as proof, though it shows neither the approach nor the shot.

A verdict like that pays out the same day it is reached. The first payment is the satisfaction of having been right before the evidence arrived. The second is smaller and harder to admit to, since it is the sight of the other side embarrassed when the recording comes out. That second payment turns anger at an event into contempt for whoever read the event differently. By the time the full footage arrives, the contempt has been living in the house for days.

Three · Where the ground is

A man with a drawn sword near Jericho

Joshua was near Jericho, the first city in the land ahead of him, when he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword (Joshua 5:13). Joshua walked over and asked the question a soldier asks of an armed stranger, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” The man answered that he was “the commander of the army of the LORD” (Joshua 5:14). Joshua fell on his face to the ground and worshiped. Then he asked what his lord had to say to his servant.

The commander’s reply gave Joshua neither of the two answers he had offered. Joshua ended up with his face on the ground, asking what he was to hear. Anyone who meets a drawn weapon in a story is tempted to put Joshua’s question first, and a reader can answer it with a flag well ahead of the evidence. The commander of the Lord’s army declined to answer it on those terms.

Moses gave Israel a rule for the time before a verdict. “Only on the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses shall a charge be established,” he told them (Deuteronomy 19:15). The judges, for their part, were to “inquire diligently” into what the witnesses had said before anyone was condemned (Deuteronomy 19:18). By 9 October the Bronx district attorney’s office was still establishing the facts. A reader’s certainty adds no witness to that work.

Entrusting himself to the one who judges justly

Mark records the other kind of court. Pilate “perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up” (Mark 15:10). The chief priests “stirred up the crowd” to demand Barabbas (Mark 15:11). The crowd had its verdict ready before one witness had been tested, and the man it condemned was Jesus, who had done nothing to earn it.

Paul wrote that the day is coming “when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Romans 2:16). The reader waiting on this story can lean on that Judge, who saw the approach and the shot that no camera has shown. He has also heard each hard word a reader has said about strangers since 8 October. Paul, then called Saul, had once minded the coats of the men who stoned Stephen (Acts 7:58), and he knew from the inside what a crowd holding a verdict can do.

Paul wrote of himself that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15). The reader who judged early, in either direction, is among those sinners and is covered by the cross. A church is the one room where a reader sure about the officers and a reader sure about the mayor can sit in the same row. Christ died for both of them, and each can be forgiven the hard words he said this week.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

These five jobs need no further recording to begin.

1. 01

   Sort what you know about 8 October by who said it.

   Rule a page into two columns, one for the record and one for the feed. Put what a named official has said on the record in the left column, with the date if you can find it. Anything you have only seen in a post or a screenshot goes in the right. The officials in this story each said something checkable, and most of what you feel strongly about will land on the right. Paul told the Thessalonians to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

2. 02

   Hold the share until the shooting itself is on video.

   When you are about to forward a clip or a post about the shooting, hold it in your drafts and look again once a recording of the shooting itself has been released. Give a friend who sends you one the same pause. David asked, “Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips!” (Psalm 141:3). A forward cannot be taken back once it is in somebody else’s feed, and the footage may favor your side or the other one.

3. 03

   Pray this week for the five-year-old and his father, and for the officers on that street.

   Do it each morning for a week, in a sentence or two. Leave the investigation to the investigators. Paul urged Timothy that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people” (1 Timothy 2:1). The boy in that back seat has a long road ahead of him once the recordings are out, and an officer who fired into a car will carry that day with him.

4. 04

   Ask someone who read the shooting differently what footage would move him.

   Pick someone you trust whose view of the shooting differs from yours. Ask him the question, then answer the same question about your own view in words he can hold you to when the footage comes out. If no recording you can imagine would move you, you are holding a loyalty and calling it a conclusion. The writer of Hebrews says, “Strive for peace with everyone” (Hebrews 12:14).

5. 05

   Ask your pastor for an hour on what the story stirred up.

   The story may have raised a contempt for a whole group of people, or a fear for a relative that follows you around. Ask a pastor or a biblical counselor this month for an hour. Describe the reader you have been, the one sure about the officers or the one sure about the mayor, and ask what he sees in it. As David put it in a psalm, “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us” (Psalm 62:8).