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If you – like me – have spent far too much time recently looking at a phone screen, replaying from different angles and from multiple different sources the last moments of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, as their lives were snuffed out by masked ICE agents in Minneapolis, then you probably already have a clear idea about what you saw. So, when such murders, or summary executions, as many might see them, are referred to as ‘officer-involved shootings’ in media reports, it certainly feels that the language being used is not doing justice to the events we see unfolding in front of our very eyes.
And when Greg Bovino, the US Border Force Commander whose sartorial choices are not the only thing that have a whiff of Gestapo about them, says that the shooting of Alex Pretti was “a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement”, it feels like a moment of jaw-dropping mendacity. Let’s remember what the multiple videos of Pretti’s shooting show: a man using his phone to film an ICE action on a street, stepping between the masked ICE agents to shield another observer who had been pushed over and then being pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by several agents, apparently having his (legally owned and licensed) handgun removed from his belt while on the ground before being shot multiple times and killed.
Any attempt to retell or write an account of an event will by its very nature encode a version of events that reflect different perspectives – both literal and ideological – and while I have tried to be as neutral as possible in my account above, I have made several significant vocabulary, syntax and punctuation choices, because I cannot attempt to mask my revulsion for the actions that I’ve seen, nor shake the sickening feeling that this is part of a wider authoritarian crackdown that is being sanctioned, encouraged and celebrated by those at the very top. We are all entitled to recast events in a way that reflects our own take on what happens, but what – I hope – most of us agree on is that we have to convey the events, actions and participants in a way that is at least truthful to a shared grasp of reality.
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Orwellian Language
In a press conference shortly after Pretti’s killing, Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary claimed that “an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a nine millimetre semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm the suspect, but the armed suspect reacted violently”. Meanwhile, White House adviser Stephen Miller posted on X that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement”, a claim retweeted by Vice President JD Vance.
Orwell gets overquoted all the time, but if you can’t quote “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” now, then when can you quote it?
None of the videos show Pretti holding, let alone ‘brandishing’ a handgun (as Noem also claimed). In fact, the only people holding guns are the ICE agents, one of whom appeared to take Pretti’s own handgun from his belt or holster shortly before the fatal shots, using it later in a picture shared by Government social media accounts to present evidence of the victim being armed and dangerous.
As we know, Pretti’s was not the first death in this current ICE crackdown, nor even the first in Minneapolis this month. Two weeks before, Renee Nicole Good, a woman involved in observing and attempting to head-off ICE snatch squads, was shot at almost point-blank range by another ICE agent. She died only a couple of blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered by the police in 2020. The official account of the Department for Homeland Security account on X posted that “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots”.
If anything is being ‘weaponized’ here it’s language. As 404 Media say in their analysis of the different videos of the shooting, “DHS is lying to you. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality”. The casual references to peaceful observers as ‘violent rioters’ and the description of Good’s attempt to drive away from the officers who were shouting at her to leave as an ‘act of domestic terrorism’ would be laughable if they weren’t delivered with such a straight face and from a government that has already classified anti-fascism (you know, opposing literal fascists…) as ‘domestic terrorism’.
Of course, President Trump went further in his own post to Truth Social, claiming that “the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
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The Passive Media Voice
Aside from these dispatches that bend reality, there have long been complaints about how the media reports on killings carried out by the police, or ‘officer-involved shootings’ (a term apparently coined by a Long Beach Police Department detective in 1972, according to Michael Conklin, the author of a 2022 paper on the term). The tendency for headlines to either use the passive voice where the grammatical agent (more often than not, also a federal agent) can be omitted (eg “a person was shot dead today in Minneapolis”) is one way of obscuring who did the actual shooting.
The passive voice isn’t necessarily the culprit on its own though. It would be easy to include the grammatical agent later in the headline, but newspaper headlines are a genre in and of themselves, tending to compress grammar to make their points; leaving out an agent is one such way to shorten a headline, but it does leave you wondering who did the shooting.
Equally, nominalisation is another linguistic process that can help compress a headline. This is where a process that’s usually described using a verb is turned into a noun or noun phrase. Someone shot another person? It becomes a shooting. Someone was killed? It’s a killing. The process, and even the participants, are wrapped up into a single noun here and we are basically faced with the end result of the verbs’ (and participants’) actions, making them a little harder to unpick when we want to ask how it all happened. That’s certainly what has happened with the phrase ‘officer-involved shooting’ and it’s one reason why many have complained about its use.
As Conklin and others have pointed out, there is even an ironic, semi-linguistic term to describe headlines that hide the role of the powerful in actions that affect the rest of us, including the police in such killings; the past exonerative tense, a term first used by political commentator William Schneider.
In fact, when media outlets use more straightforward language – often headlines in the active voice – as we saw last week (“Federal Agents Kill a 37-year-old Minneapolis Man” or “Federal Officers Shoot Person in Minneapolis”), it causes a ripple of surprise. “Years and years of avoiding plain language and the active voice do make the choice to use it more impactful, I suppose,” commented one Bluesky user.
Does any of this actually matter, though? We know that language can influence how we see the world (if it didn’t, why would we bother to use it?) but can framings like this change the way we view the police and their actions? This is something looked into by Jonathan Moreno-Medina, Aurelie Ouss, Patrick Bayer and Bocar Ba in their 2022 paper Officer-Involved: The Media Language of Police Killings in which they tested the effects of ‘obfuscatory language’ such as that used in media headlines and articles on 2,400 participants, finding that it “decreases the assignment of moral responsibility and the desired level of accountability for police officers who kill civilians”.
As well as what might be seen as some quite micro-level language choices, the researchers suggest that the problem runs deeper than just a few words and sentences. They add that “the narrative structures employed by media outlets, which often mirror those used in press releases and tweets by police departments and unions, impact the way that the public understands the harms from policing more generally, as well as support for police accountability and reform”.
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Shaping the Narrative
This is something picked up by the author of 2025’s Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, Alec Karakatsanis. He writes, “In article after article, hundreds of times a month and tens of thousands of times during our adult lives, we are bombarded with a curated selection of facts about the world that depends on who is telling us the story. In ways large and small, this deluge makes us think more like the people we are exposed to”.
He goes on to add that in early 2023, Chicago police had “forty-eight full-time positions devoted to manipulating public information” and in 2020 “Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department alone had forty-two full-time employees” doing the same thing. In a news industry where budgets are low and time is scarce, what the police and federal agencies say, and how they say it, often goes straight into the newspapers and onto our news feeds.
Which, in a way, takes us back to where we started. The US Government is investing huge amounts of manpower, money and political capital in its anti-immigration drive, not just on the streets but in the newspapers, online news sources and airwaves. It’s an investment that is designed to shape the narrative, change the ways that we and the rest of the public – in the US and abroad – view the events that are happening and language is one part of their arsenal.
It wasn’t words that killed Alex Pretti or Renee Nicole Good, or words that killed George Floyd, Philando Castile, Jordan Edwards, Walter Scott or Sonya Massey (the list could go on), but the language used to conceal the roles of those responsible and the language used to smear and discredit many of them after their deaths shows us what the stakes are for the forces behind their deaths, and how important they see the language being used to shape the public response.
As the parents of Alex Pretti said in their statement after their son’s death and about the demonstrably false narrative being spun by the most powerful people in the USA, “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting… Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man”.
If the truth still matters, then words still matter in telling that truth.
Dan Clayton is an education consultant at the English and Media Centre in London. He has taught English for more than 20 years and is the author ofAttitudes to Language, co-author of Language Diversity and World Englishesand co-editor of Knowing About Language. He runs @EngLangBlog on Bluesky and is part of the Lexis podcast team.