A bullet hole in the windshield of the vehicle driven by Renée Good when she was killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.Ben Hovland/AP

On Wednesday, a masked federal immigration officer killed Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and poet, shooting her at point-blank range in her car. 

The incident, which has made headlines across the nation, is far from the first time immigration officers have shot someone in recent months. Good is one of at least nine people across the country who have been shot by immigration agents since September, the New York Times reports. There is something every case has in common: Everyone was in a vehicle at the time of the shooting.

“For decades now, officers have been trained that they can avoid being run over if they just don’t position themselves in a vehicle’s path of travel. “

The pattern raises serious concerns. For decades, cops have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City’s police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. All of the country’s largest 25 cities generally prohibit firing at vehicles as well, a Times investigation found in 2021.

Instead of shooting, law enforcement officers are taught to do something much safer for everybody involved: Get out of the way. But the federal agents enforcing President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign seem not to be following this rule, and are taking a far more dangerous path. 

To better understand how cops are supposed to decide whether to use force against drivers, I spoke on Wednesday evening with Seth Stoughton, a former Florida police officer who is now a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. He is nationally recognized on the use of force by law enforcement and testified for the prosecution in the case against Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George........

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