First, they lie.

I say this from long, weary experience with the subject.

After most unjustifiable shootings by law enforcement officers, first, they lie.

Today's news has sent me back to the place I really do hate to go, the subject that began my journalism career.

Police use of deadly force. The first article ever published in the New York Times about the

problems associated with police use of deadly force was the first article I ever wrote.

That was in 1979. I've been with that subject ever since. In that article, I made the point, as I have made ever since, that most

shootings by police are justified. Most shootings by police are legitimately done in defense of life,

most of them. But the worst shootings by the police amount to inflicting the death penalty

on the street without trial, without evidence, and without a crime being committed. My first book

was titled Deadly Force and described a bad shooting by Boston police in which they told the

lie that the man the two officers shot in the back and in the back of the head was trying to

run them down with

his car. That was a lie. That is a lie that police have been using to justify bad shootings

since the invention of the automobile. Prior to the age of video, it was almost impossible to prove

that police were lying in situations like that, but beginning with the first video of police crime, the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991.

We as citizens have been given the opportunity with video to make our own judgments about what we see with our own eyes, and we have that ability tonight.

Thanks to the video shot by an eyewitness today in Minnesota, where one of Donald Trump's ICE agents shot

and killed an unarmed 37-year-old woman for no apparent reason that can be found on the video

of that shooting.

And first, they lied.

Christy Noam, the cabinet member with jurisdiction over the ICE officer who fired his gun for no apparent reason on the video, as you will see in a moment, told this lie in her very first statement about the shooting, which she

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