Following his investigation of a routine automobile accident Friday night, Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth (shown) pulled his police cruiser into a Chevron station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, and began filling it up. Shannon Miles, a black man with a long criminal record, approached Goforth from behind and shot him in the head. Goforth pitched forward onto the pavement and Miles straddled his body, pumping three more bullets into his back.
Goforth died at the scene. Miles was tracked down by authorities and arrested and charged with capital murder early Saturday morning.
Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman called it an ambush. When asked about a possible motive, Hickman said only that investigators would be looking at whether Miles was motivated by anger over recent killings elsewhere of black men by police that spawned the violently racist Black Lives Matter group:
I think that’s something that we have to keep an eye on. The general climate of that kind of rhetoric can be influential on people to do things like this. We’re still searching to find out if that’s actually a motive…
This rhetoric has gotten out of control. We’re heard that 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.
Just what kind of rhetoric would that be? The kind of vile filth pouring from the mouths of the three Marxist revolutionaries who founded Black Lives Matter following the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2013. The group accuses America of teeming with “virulent anti-Black racism [that] permeates our society” and maintains that the country’s “corrupt democracy” was “built on indigenous genocide and chattel slavery” and “continues to thrive on the brutal exploitation of people of color.”
The group claims that “structural oppression” routinely “de-humanizes” blacks and “deprives [them] of their basic human rights and dignity.” Further, BLM insists that such rampant racism results in “extrajudicial killings [of blacks] by police and vigilantes” and consequently, black Americans are “collectively” subjected to “inhumane conditions” in a “white supremacist system.”
Little mention was made by the national media covering the murder of Goforth of the obvious parallels to the revenge murders of two New York City police officers last December while they sat in their cruiser. At the time investigators were tracking the motives behind Ismaalyl Brinsley’s broad-daylight murders of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. Said NYC Police Commissioner William Bratton: “No warning, no provocation — they were quite simply assassinated, targeted for their uniforms” — just like Goforth.
Before committing these atrocities, however, Brinsley made very clear exactly what his intentions and motives were by writing on his Instagram page:
I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours … let’s take 2 of theirs.
This may be my final post.
Brinsley murdered the two officers almost exactly three weeks after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict a police officer for the chokehold that contributed to the death of Eric Garner. Brinsley, like Miles, had a criminal record dating back years: for carrying a concealed weapon, for shoplifting, for criminal trespass, for criminal property damage, and for illegally discharging a firearm.
Twenty-three officers have been killed nationwide since the first of the year, but 10 were killed in the month of May — the month after the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore.
As noted earlier, the link between Black Lives Matter and the murder of Darren Goforth by the criminal Shannon Miles remains, at this writing, tenuous. But the unprovoked attack by a black man with a long criminal record on an unsuspecting white police officer merely because he was wearing a uniform is in line with BLM’s mantra of hate and revolutionary extremism.
In July, BLM activists disrupted a Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Arizona, at which Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was attempting to speak, by chanting the following (excerpts):
If I die in police custody, avenge my death! By any means necessary!
If I die in police custody, make sure I’m the last person to die in police custody. By any means necessary!
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
