At this point, the “war on police” rhetoric is not only unsupported, it’s dangerous and reckless.

On one level, one might be able to understand the overheated language from these officials. A coworker had just lost his life in a brutal fashion. Emotions were high. The loss was still raw.

Furthermore, there was a protest over the weekend — which apparently took place after Goforth was shot — by a group of Black Lives Matter protesters at the Minnesota state fair in which some protesters were captured on video chanting, “Pigs in a blanket; fry ’em like bacon.” An organizer of that demonstration, Trahern Crews, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that the chant was chanted in a “playful” context as they joked back and forth with an officer monitoring the march.

That context is not at all apparent from the video. How you view this movement will inform how plausible you find the “playful” explanation. But whatever the context, I think we can all agree that at the very least, chants like that are ill advised in protests against police brutality. Many people took the chant literally, as a terrorist threat. And one can hardly blame them.

But many in the media who are hostile to the movement went even further, using the chant and Goforth’s tragic death as tools to support and promote a narrative that Black Lives Matter itself is a hate group that has declared war on the police, even though, at this point, there is no evidence whatsoever that the suspect, Shannon J. Miles, was affiliated with or influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement.

(We do know that Miles “spent four months in a mental hospital in 2012 after being declared incompetent to stand trial in an aggravated assault case,” according to The Houston Chronicle.)

The thing that many people have criticized the protesters for — exploiting a tragedy, rushing to judgment, putting narrative ahead of facts — was precisely what they did.

Over the weekend, the Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro asked her guest, Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. of Milwaukee County: “Is it open season on law enforcement in this country?”