John Danaher is a former assistant U.S. attorney and former commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Safety and was a judge of the Connecticut Superior Court from 2010 to 2020. He currently lives in Cape Elizabeth.

The recent shooting death of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE officer has, sadly and unfortunately predictably, drawn multiple immediate reactions from across the political spectrum. Individuals, often people with no law enforcement or investigative experience, have already made definitive statements about what happened and who was ultimately responsible for the shooting.

Determining exactly what happened in a situation like the one in Minneapolis is no easy task. We have all seen the videos and read the reports. Many have already concluded that the shooting was justified. Many quickly concluded that the shooting was murder.

After more than 20 years as a federal prosecutor, three years as a state police commissioner and 10 years as a judge, I have learned one thing about such events that is consistently true: the first reports about such incidents are either wrong or lack sufficient information to reach an accurate conclusion, or both.

Having no special access to information about the Minneapolis shooting, I nonetheless have a number of preliminary questions for which, to my knowledge, no answers are generally available at this point.

When ICE agents approached the driver from the left side of the vehicle, and attempted to open the driver’s door, was the driver looking at them when she began to drive forward? If so, at what point, if any, did she look toward the front of her car as it began to move?

Will a forensic pathologist be able to determine if there was a single fatal shot and, if so, can that analysis, perhaps coupled with ballistic analysis, determine whether the ICE officer firing the shot did so when he was in front of the vehicle or when he was by the side of the vehicle as it was moving away from him?

Anyone responsible for a fair, unbiased investigation into this terrible event will undoubtedly have many more questions before forming a final conclusion about who was ultimately responsible for the victim’s death.

While serving as a federal prosecutor, I was once assigned to investigate a fatal shooting by a police officer who was standing near the front quarter panel on the driver’s side of a car when the officer drew his weapon and fired at the driver.

Then, as with the case in Minneapolis, there were those who immediately faulted the driver and those who immediately faulted the officer. The investigation took months and included acquiring an analysis by an accident reconstruction expert, a ballistics expert and others, in order to re-create the event in an effort to determine whether the shooting was justified.

In that case, we ultimately concluded, to a level of reasonable scientific certainty, that the driver had cut the wheels sharply to the right, accelerated in reverse, and was making every effort to run down the officer immediately prior to the shooting. Indeed, the investigation concluded that the officer would have been struck by the vehicle had he not opened fire.

The facts that we developed led to our conclusion that, in that case, the officer was clearly at risk of being killed, he had no avenue of escape, and the shooting was therefore justified. We released a lengthy and detailed report, setting forth the issue, the nature of the investigation and the reasons for our conclusion.

There were, and there will always be, some who did not accept the findings. However, once all of those facts were released, there was little disagreement from the public at large.

It is understandable that people want to know, immediately, who was at fault when such an event takes place. But it is also true, as H.L. Mencken once famously said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” I suggest that Mencken’s warning be heeded in this situation and in any similar situation.

It is disheartening when anyone, especially political leadership, reaches a virtually instantaneous interpretation of an important event based principally on political orientation. I recognize that many of us have gone down a dark path whereby almost any issue, whether pertaining to science, health, social problems or myriad other situations, is analyzed solely by political orientation.

I also know that my thoughts will do little or nothing to change the views of anyone who views life solely through the lens of his or her political views. But I think there is hope, and I base that hope on reactions from more responsible leaders, one of them right here in Maine.

I was so heartened to hear that Portland Mayor Mark Dion stood on higher ground than many national leaders when he said that he will not form an opinion about the Minneapolis shooting until he has more facts about what happened.

It is said that, for those who form opinions without facts, no facts will change their opinion. We can move forward in a positive way if, like Mayor Dion, we rely on facts, if we value truth, and if we set aside political affiliation in order to identify and resolve the problems that we face.