Ted Cruz

Rep. Beto O’Rourke supports firing killer Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, and Sen. Ted Cruz sees a political opportunity. “I wish Beto O’Rourke and Democrats weren’t so quick to always blame the police officer,” Cruz said in an interview immediately after having described Botham Jean as having “found himself murdered” and having allowed for the possibility that Guyger actions were possibly “a horrifying and horrific misunderstanding” but that possibly “it may be something else.”

“That’s why we have a legal justice system to actually learn what the facts are and learn what happened,” Cruz said. That’s why “I don’t think we should jump to conclusions.”

Here’s the thing, Ted. Amber Guyger may or may not have intentionally murdered Botham Jean, but she definitely killed him while he was peaceably in his own apartment. Seeing her actions in the most favorable light, she went to the wrong apartment, failed to notice that she was not in her own apartment, and killed a man, then changed her story a couple times. Even if you think she does not deserve prison time over this—a big if, but go with me here—even if Amber Guyger does not belong in prison, there is some distance between prison and continued employment on the police force. There are intermediate positions between “she should be convicted of murder” and “she should continue on the public payroll carrying a gun to enforce laws and make arrests.” One of those positions is “perhaps this is not someone we can trust to protect public safety and enforce laws, even while the legal justice system sorts out what crimes she may have committed.”

There are basic competence issues here! Police officers have to be able to show up at the addresses they’re called to—wouldn’t a police officer who can’t tell when she’s in her own apartment be a liability when being called in a hurry to an unknown address where a crime was being committed? Even if you think Guyger would have been behaving reasonably for immediately killing an intruder in her own apartment, she wasn’t in her apartment, and we’re to believe—the sympathetic understanding of the situation is that—she couldn’t recognize that basic fact. Who cannot understand the idea that a person can be disqualified from holding a specific job for something short of criminal behavior?

But Ted Cruz knows what’s important: what white Republicans want to hear. And so “It may well be that two lives were destroyed that night.”

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