The top U.S. news on September 2 in the Daily Mail newspaper in Britain concerned the recent killing of police officers: “Three cops murdered in less than a week: Another officer is found slaughtered in his Texas home amid growing safety fears and a manhunt for the Illinois cop killers who got away.”
In Abilene, Texas, police Officer Don Allen, 27, was found murdered in his home within hours of police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, 52, being gunned down in the street while on a morning patrol in Fox Lake, Ill., a suburb of Chicago.
Lt. Gliniewicz, survived by his wife and four sons, had served with the Fox Lake Police Department for 32 years and was a U.S. Army veteran.
Both aforementioned officers’ deaths followed the execution-style killing of Houston-area Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth, 47, on the previous Friday. He was shot 15 times at a gas station near Houston after refueling his patrol car. A 10-year veteran of the force, Deputy Goforth left behind a wife and two children, a 12-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son.
Deputy Goforth appeared to have been targeted simply “because he wore a uniform,” said Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman.
Cautioned Hickman: “When the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated, cold-blooded assassinations of police officers happen, this rhetoric has gotten out of control. We’ve heard ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Well, all lives matter. Cops lives matter. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and say ‘Lives Matter’ and take that to the bank?”
Referring to the killer of Deputy Goforth, Hickman said the “general climate of that kind of rhetoric can be influential on people who do things like that.”
Charged with capital murder in Goforth’s death was Shannon Miles, 30, whose criminal record includes convictions for resisting arrest, criminal mischief greater than $1,500, discharging or displaying a firearm, giving false information to a police officer, criminal trespassing, disorderly conduct with a gun, and two arrests for using force against a police officer.
Just hours after Deputy Goforth was murdered, as reported on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” an anti-cops chant was captured on video at a Black Lives Matter march in St. Paul at the Minnesota State Fair.
“Pigs in a Blanket, Fry ’em Like Bacon, Pigs in a Blanket” chanted the demonstrators at the fairgrounds.
Said Rashad Turner, lead organizer for Black Lives Matter St. Paul, responding to the criticism expressed about the chant by the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association: “We’re not going to be distracted by their attempts to minimize our movement and focus on a chant that lasted only 30 seconds.”
Seconds matter, of course. It took only a second or so for Deputy Gorforth to die after Shannon Miles shot a bullet into the back of his head.
March organizer Trahern Crews stated that the anti-police chant at the Minnesota State Fair following the killing of Deputy Goforth was just a “playful” interaction between the activists and the cops who were escorting the marchers.
Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics and the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
