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Mother Jones' article was quite trenchant in its scathing assessment of Cruz:
On Friday, Rep. Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic nominee for Texas Senate, told an audience at a Dallas church that Amber Guyger, the police officer who broke into the home of Botham Jean, her 26-year-old neighbor, and killed him on September 6th, should be fired.
What Cruz is doing here isn't exactly subtle. As with his prior attacks on O'Rourke for supporting Colin Kaerpernick's protest of police shootings, the incumbent wants to cast his Democratic rival as an America-bashing, anti-cop radical.Ted Cruz Wants to Avoid Rush to Judgment on Cop Who Broke Into Apartment and Killed NeighborCruz, evidently, sees Guyger's case as a political opportunity. But he's sticking his neck out after a deadly incident whose facts have already caused some conservatives to rethink their broader perspectives on police shootings. O'Rourke, for his part, wasn't calling for summary legal judgment; he was saying that an officer, who, in the most favorable reading, accidentally committed a home invasion that ended in a homicide, should not continue to be armed and deputized by the state to shoot to kill. Cruz is silent on that question.
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I will close by leaving it to the Texas Tribune, which I believe to be the most venerable media outlet in Texas, to cast a clear and penetrating analysis of all of this:
Though Guyger already faces a charge of manslaughter, it's not unusual for her to still have her job at this stage of the investigation. Police departments often struggle to balance giving a fair review of an officer's actions and ensuring accountability after a seemingly-unjustified shooting or incident. While there have been cases, including some in Dallas, where officers are fired quickly after a shooting, the process usually takes time. Still, in a case where the facts that have been made public seem to clearly put the officer in the wrong, many think 12 days is too long to wait for action.
Since then, protests have erupted across the city, including at the Dallas Cowboys' first home game of the season Sunday night, where activists marched with coffins to AT&T Stadium, according to The Dallas Morning News. The Dallas Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Guyger's status.The city's reaction stands in stark contrast to the Balch Springs shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards last year. The officer, Roy Oliver, was fired by the smaller Dallas County department three days after the shooting and sentenced to 15 years in prison on a murder conviction last month.
The reason for the delay often stems from internal processes, potential appeals and the departmental investigation taking a backseat to the criminal investigation, according to Howard Williams, a former police chief in San Marcos and a criminal justice lecturer at Texas State University."There are laws that protect the employee " you don't want to jump in right away and make a hasty decision," Williams said. "[The decision] has to happen in its own time through its own process, and you have to be very careful not to let the internal process interfere with the criminal one."
From the Texas Tribune article, After the death of Botham Jean, should a Dallas officer be fired?
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It is my humble opinion, that in this recent fiasco, Cruz made catastrophic errors, bordering on racism, alienating hundreds of thousands of fence-sitting Texans, (who are generally not known for their compassion).
And this for a guy who graduated cum laude from Princeton University from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and then .Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude. Beto, on the other hand, with his degree in English from Columbia University, has the far more valuable intelligence that he has gained from his populist approach, actually talking profoundly and directly with an enormous number of Texans, without campaign advisors, or pollsters, or Political Action Committees and their money.
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