By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--August 31, 2015
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Our system of justice absolutely requires law enforcement be present to protect our community so any point when the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated, cold-blooded assassination of police officers happen this rhetoric has gotten out of control. We've heard black lives matter -- all lives matter -- well, cops' lives matter too. So why don't we just drop the qualifier and just say lives matter and take that to the bank.An impassioned Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson (R) weighed in, saying:
It is time for the silent majority in this country to support law enforcement. There are a few bad apples in every profession. That does not mean that there should be open warfare declared on law enforcement. The vast majority of officers are there to do the right thing, are there because they care about their community and want to make it a safer place. What happened last night is an assault on the very fabric of society. It is not anything that we can tolerate. It is time to come forward and support law enforcement and condemn this atrocious act.
According to public records, Miles had dozens of encounters with law enforcement. He was charged on New Year’s Eve 2006 with displaying or discharging a firearm, and was sentenced to 15 days in jail. In 2007 and again in 2009, he was convicted of resisting arrest, and University of Houston police twice charged him with giving false or fictitious information to a police officer.One commenter at the newspaper's website wrote, "I wonder if Obama is going to send 75 FBI agents, to Texas, to find out if this was a race related crime. Oh, wait, the victim was white, never mind." Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller reports that news of Goforth's murder didn't dampen the spirits of radical black anti-police demonstrators in Minnesota:
Black Lives Matter protesters marching on the Minnesota state fair on Saturday spewed violent anti-cop rhetoric just hours after a Harris County, Tex. sheriff’s deputy was ambushed and executed at a Houston-area gas station. “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” activists with the St. Paul, Minn. branch of Black Lives Matter chanted while marching behind a group of police officers down a highway just south of the state fair grounds..Accused killer Miles attended Prairie View A&M University, studying business administration, according to his Facebook page, the Los Angeles Times also reports. This is the school where Sandra Bland, a troubled young black woman, was arrested after exhibiting erratic behavior during a traffic stop and allegedly assaulting a police officer. Bland tragically committed suicide in jail. Her case has become a cause celebre for the conspiracy theorists of Black Lives Matter who in the complete absence of evidence accuse the police of murdering her. Houston-based Texas state representative, Garnet F. Coleman, a black Democrat, whined over the weekend that law enforcement was using Goforth's brutal killing to push a racist political agenda. “It strikes me as politicizing a death that, I don’t know that anyone knows what was in the mind of the shooter,” Coleman said. “I think black lives matter. I think deputy sheriffs’ lives matter. But I think the statement shows a lack of understanding of what is occurring in this country when it comes to the singling out of African-Americans.” Coleman is in charge of a legislative inquiry into the death of Bland, who was found hanging in a Waller County, Texas jail cell in July.
You can’t make sense of evil. Evil is evil. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I don’t know what was going on in that young man’s life. Whatever it was, it was dark.Goforth leaves behind a wife and two children, aged 5 and 12. Deputy Robert Goerlitz, president of the Harris County Deputies’ Organization, said of Goforth, “I’ve seen some dedicated folks, but he was above and beyond." Goforth refused to allow injuries he sustained during training to prevent his progress. “He wouldn’t give up." He added the late deputy was a “wonderful family man” who often talked of his family. “He was an extremely hard worker,” said Goerlitz, who served as Goforth’s patrol instructor at the sheriff’s academy and had known him since 2008. If the racist, cop-hating community organizers of Black Lives Matter get their way, tributes and eulogies like that for fallen police officers are going to become an everyday occurrence.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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