(1) He organized an interactive forum on criminal justice and 

(2) He dared suggest Asheville and Buncombe County were at risk for becoming another liberal city/community of the lost.

Bravo to the congressman for his concern and courage. It’s too bad that the majority of those in attendance were devoted to several less-than-Godly agendas:

(1) Dodging accountability for the mess and 

(2) Offering the same old CYA echo-chamber nonsense on money, coming together, addressing poverty, etc.. that have turned our eyes glassy and failed miserably for decades.

For fun, and with all due respect for the forum participants (don’t tell anyone, but you’d find more candor and creativity in a New Orleans strip joint), I wonder if Mr. Onuoha would mind if I doubled down on his quote?

Here’s to you Mr. O...

It is not Godly to manipulate statistics — Though about everyone in criminal justice touts statistics as the holy grail, the numbers are a sham. The Buncombe sheriff and Asheville police chief express pleasure in the fact that some crime figures have dropped this past year. That most of those numbers are for offenses no longer effectively enforced, and that people consequently no longer bother to report them, is conveniently extricated from the bluster.

It is not Godly to pick and choose from the judicial puzzle — Laws, enforcement, forensic labs, adjudication, imprisonment and post-incarceration bridging are not stand-alone entities. You have to fix all of the pieces or you are guaranteed to fail. In the criminal justice world, we do the medical equivalent of determining a victim has a bunch of gunshot wounds, putting a band-aide over the holes, and then congratulating ourselves on our sincerity.

It is not Godly to forget that safety is job one — Without safety, nothing works – nothing. Unless we are all planning to become citizen vigilantes, safety is out elected government’s job. Too many of our elected officials talk well, but walk poorly in realistically challenging criminal justice system failures. Everything else should be taking a back seat to this issue. For a bird’s eye view into our lack of authenticity at the city, county and state level, witness the ridiculous timemlag of our state crime labs, our lack of jail space and the chronically underfunded resource allocations necessary for an efficient judiciary.

It’s not Godly to be a mayor and denigrate your police force — Remember the downtown mobs marketed as “peaceful protestors?” Remember how the mayor and other elected officials beat our officers to death while giving a pass to the riotous? Remember how our officers got the message and resigned in mass and didn’t return? Remember when the law was enforced and you could get a response when something bad happened? Well then, you should remember now when the mayor talks about everything but her own accountability for why that happened.

It’s not Godly to be a media outlet with a biased view — We do not have investigative journalism in Asheville. We do have a variety of mostly slanted media outlets who dependably emphasize and side with the liberal view. In truth, no one should get a pass on truth. Report it fairly from all reasoned angles of view or don’t report it at all. Asheville’s journalism pool is filled with some of the most dangerous criminals around – propaganda artists hiding behind a journalism degree coached in liberal sophistry.

It is not Godly to ignore the power of accountability and choice — We live in a culture deceiving itself into believing that liberty can exist without accountability and that personal choice is not really a consideration in the criminal absurdities flooding our society. Take away personal responsibility from any helping equation and failure is assured. And like it or not America, personal choice will always be the number one determinant of where lives land.

It is not Godly to allow drugs to stomp out so many lives — We are living in the middle of a drug-infused zombie apocalypse and are not serious about the ones doing the biting. Until we get fast and furious on drug dealers, stop pretending our treatment methodologies and resources are remotely up to the challenge of helping addicts, and rethink our broader cultural dive into the silly notion that one can build a normal life on any drug, we are guaranteed to fail in protecting our children, friends, families and neighbors. Nor will we do the one thing that will help us succeed in ending this apocalypse – intercept users and, thus, new addiction recruits.

There are lots of other things we can do. But we’re out of space and need not waste our time.

The folks who can do something about this issue will read this article with one primary point of concern – “Is there anything in this that points the finger at me?”

Covering itself is the number one priority of any bureaucracy – our floundering criminal justice system is anything but an exception.