In The Wall Street Journal, William McGurn offers his way to prevent altercations and violence involving federal officers on the streets of Minneapolis:

Tell citizens exercising their right to protest not to get in the way of those enforcing the law.

This weekend, America saw how deadly the consequences of noncooperation can be. In the tragic ICE shooting of Alex Pretti. Much of what happened is still in dispute. But we know—largely from videos that have been broadcast around the world—that the handgun Mr. Pretti legally owned and carried was taken from him before he was killed.

Why Only in Minnesota

• Homeland Security SecretaryKristi Noem accused Mr. Pretti of “brandishing” his gun in Minnesota
• Tim Walz—who last year called ICE “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo”—refers to ICE’s presence as an “occupation.”
• Meanwhile, ICE appears to operate safely in other states.

Mr. McGurn writes that the simplest way to make such encounters safer is for local authorities to cooperate with federal law enforcement.

If ICE could count on this cooperation when its agents sought to arrest someone in Minnesota, the enforcement would be handled quietly and probably without incident.

Mr. McGurn also wonders if Mr. Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey are stoking the flames, perhaps because the unrest helps divert attention from the $9 billion in taxpayer dollars lost to welfare fraud on their watch.

From Minnesota’s last Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty:

• Highlight the corrosive effect of the Walz-Frey resistance on federal law enforcement
• rightly emphasizes that the videos of Mr. Pretti being shot provoke questions that demand answers.
• question the mentality that Minneapolis is exempt from federal laws because of the self-righteousness of people who don’t like them.

In such a highly charged environment, the details of the shootings become messy.

What we do know is that when the time came for local leaders to use their knowledge and resources to reduce the lawlessness, they preferred that the streets direct events rather than the courts, law enforcement or the political process.

In American Greatness, this morning is an article on a book by Rory Miller. It is called Force Decisions: A Citizen’s Guide. It was written by Miller, who served for many years as “a corrections officer and sergeant working booking, maximum security, and mental health units” and “trained corrections and enforcement officers, primarily in force-related skills…”

Millier wrote the book to help civilians understand how police determine appropriate use of force:

• Any use of force appears shocking to the uninitiated.

• Popple who make judgments about use-of—force situations were not involved in, usually have access to info the officer did not have, and almost always have far more time to analyze info.

• They also lack the info the officer had. They did not see, hear, feel, smell, or sense what the officer did.

• Stopping violence or potential violence is a separate issue from “justice”–motive and mental competency are keys to determining the level of criminal capability, but are irrelevant to whether someone must be stopped before he or she hurts someone.

The book is structured around a series of “hard truths,” each of which gives a glimpse into the issues that surround law enforcement use of force and provides a framework for understanding the conditions that necessitate force escalation. The author and his publisher are very careful to note that their work does not constitute formal legal advice (and I reiterate that here), yet it’s clear that the point of all of this is to enable those who have no professional law enforcement experience to appreciate the decision-making process in the use of force, even—or especially—when that process must be completed in a split second.