Politicizing a good cop's death to slur #BlackLivesMatter

One of the easiest things in this world is to leap to a conclusion -- especially when there's some circumstantial evidence that fits what you're looking for. It's also a very bad thing to do. I know because I've done it myself -- and I regret it to this day. Six years ago, a part-time census worker in rural Appalachia was found strung from a tree with the word "Fed" scrawled on his body. Although I was careful to note that the case was still under investigation, I wrote about the man's death in the context of right-wing anti-government chatter during the first year of the Obama administration. I was writing a book about the Tea Party at the time and had just gotten back from a gun rally in Kentucky (true story). Anyway, it turned out the man had staged his suicide so his beneficiary could collect the insurance. I'd made a mistake...and also learned a lesson.

You'd think if anyone would know better than a lowly journalist/blogger not to leap to conclusions -- especially on little or no evidence -- it would be high-ranking law enforcement officials in a major American city.

You'd think.

This weekend, Houston -- and the world -- lost a good man, a 47-year-old Harris County sheriff's deputy named Darren Goforth -- a veteran law-enforcement officer, a husband, and a father to two children. In a cowardly act of violence, Goforth was attacked by a gunman as he was filling up at a gas station. The senseless shooting was captured on video, and police soon arrested a 30-year-old man with a history of mental illness and clashing with police officers.

"There are no words for this," his widow Kathleen Goforth said in a statement. "He was always loyal, fiercely so. He was ethical. The right thing to do is what guided his internal compass." President Obama called her later in the weekend to send his condolences, a sentiment that all of us share. The president called the assassination of Deputy Goforth "an affront to civilized society."

Those are the facts of a sad and infuriating story. But top officials in Harris County -- including the sheriff and the district attorney -- went well beyond the facts of the case. Deputy Goforth had barely been transported to the morgue when these law-enforcement officials held a nationally televised news conference to blame the murder on the #BlackLivesMatter movement that's been confronting America's uniquely high rate of police-involving killings. They did so even as they also acknowledged they had absolutely no information -- none, nada -- about what the killer's actual motive was

"We've heard black lives matter, all lives matter. Well, cops' lives matter, too, so why don't we just drop the qualifiers and just say lives matter and take that to the bank," Sheriff Ron Hickman said. Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson suggested that protesting police misconduct had led to "open warfare on law enforcement" -- even though, thankfully, murders of on-duty law-enforcement officers are lower than a decade or so ago.

If Anderson or Hickman had uttered such baseless accusations in court, their words would have been tossed out by the judge and perhaps the basis for misconduct charges. Instead, the invented allegation was barely questioned by a feckless mainstream news media, then amplified by the right-wing echo chamber of faux news and political opportunists who seized on a chance to squelch a growing movement for social justice by linking it to a high-profile murder. It's fair to note that officials in Harris County were emotional about the murder of a colleague -- but where was the professionalism to know not to toss a match onto a political bonfire, with such rank speculation?

We've seen this playbook so many times before. Any movement in this country -- for social justice, for human rights, against unjustified wars and militarism -- is spied on, harassed, prosecuted, roughed up, and gleefully attacked by the button-down defenders of the status quo in the well-fed media and the lower political classes. COINTELPRO. Kent State. The FBI's suicide-seeking note to Martin Luther King. Spiro Agnew and the war on protesters and the press. The coordinated crushing of the Occupy Movement, just four short years ago. It just never stops.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement is hardly a monolith -- more an umbrella group of citizens who looked around, saw that more people are killed by police in America in a day or two than during a year in most other Western nations, and said, "What can we do about this?" The courage it takes in this country to simply say, "Enough is enough," can be enormous. Supporters of the movement have been monitored by the government, get attacked on social media every few seconds, watch right-wing pseudo-journalists dig up phony dirt on their private lives, and now have the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Gov. Nikki Haley falsely branding them as murderers, all for a few rating points or a slot on the 2016 GOP ticket. That's repulsive.

And yet that which doesn't kill the #BlackLivesMatter movement is only likely to make it stronger. The "#BlackLivesMatter is a murder movement" meme needs to be exposed for what it is -- a desperate ploy to change the conversation.

What the Bill O'Reillys of the world won't say is that it's possible to both mourn the loss of Deputy Goforth and ask questions about why law enforcement is on a pace to kill more than 1,000 U.S. citizens this year, including dozens of unarmed black youths. That you can believe that murdering an officer is an affront to a civilized society, but feel the same way are the deaths on a lonely cell of a woman tossed in jail for a botched traffic stop or a hungry young man jailed for months for stealing $5 of stuff from the 7-Eleven. Those are the conversations they don't want to have -- because they can't win them.

Gun violence in America, policing, race, murder -- these are difficult and uncomfortable issues, but there's no sin in politicizing them, because they are deeply political questions. What is a sin, however, is using a murder to spread a baseless political smear. Especially in the name of an officer who, in the words of those who knew him, was always ethical and guided by "the right thing to do." The people telling lies in the name of Deputy Goforth are dishonoring his life and his work, and they need to stop.