In the July 19 issue of USA Today, there appeared an op-ed piece that ran under this headline: “Listen to the Baton Rouge Police Killer: Tavis Smiley.”

I am aware that columnists most often do not supply their own headlines, and I am aware that headlines are sometimes crafted more with an eye toward space limitations than to the content of the piece. So I was prepared to allow Smiley some latitude. The headline, I assumed, could not possibly reflect what he had written. I was wrong, and the piece itself was even more offensive than its absurd headline.

Smiley begins by anticipating that President Obama will travel to Baton Rouge and attend the memorial service being planned for the three police officers murdered there on Sunday. In Smiley’s view, the president’s attendance at the service would cause a “conversation . . . to erupt about the optics of such a visit. And they don’t look good. Cops killed by black civilians and the president shows up, black civilians killed by cops and he does not.”

So, in Smiley’s view, in order to ensure the proper “optics,” the president of the United States must demonstrate equal regard, and an equivalent level of mourning, for police officers murdered in the line of duty and for people killed by the police, regardless of the circumstance in which they were killed.

Elsewhere in the piece Smiley wrote, “Obama passed on visiting Minnesota and Baton Rouge [where two controversial police killings had occurred] to tamp down tensions that were, and make no mistake, are still boiling. A golden opportunity was missed to explicitly say to young black folk [sic] that their lives matter too.”

The man killed in Minnesota was Philando Castile, whose girlfriend shared his dying moments with the world via Facebook. Her video is indeed compelling and disturbing, but it tells us next to nothing about the circumstances attending the shooting. Smiley must be of the opinion that the shooting was unlawful, making Castile another symbol of a racist criminal-justice system and therefore deserving of President Obama’s presence at his funeral. If Smiley has reached this conclusion, he must be aware of facts not yet disclosed. Smiley — and so many others, including the president — reached a similar conclusion about the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., only to see their assumptions disproven by a Missouri grand jury and President Obama’s own Justice Department.

The facts surrounding the death of Alton Sterling, the man shot by police in Baton Rouge, are far less murky than Castile’s case, but contrary to Smiley’s apparent belief, they weigh heavily in favor of the police. Officers were summoned to a report of a man who had threatened someone with a gun. When the officers confronted Sterling, who was in fact the suspect described in the radio call, he resisted their efforts to subdue him and attempted to pull a gun from his pocket. All of this was made explicit in a video shot by a witness standing nearby. We would soon learn that Sterling’s opulent criminal record included an arrest and conviction for resisting arrest while armed with a gun, an incident that mirrored the current controversy in every respect but the fatal outcome. Does Smiley believe, does anyone believe, that President Obama should have attended Sterling’s funeral? Would Smiley prefer that Sterling had prevailed in the confrontation and killed the two officers?

If that had been the case, perhaps Smiley would today be referring to Sterling as a “disaffected black man” as he does to Micah X. Johnson and Gavin Long, the killers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, respectively. “How many more disaffected black men,” Smiley asks, “have to self-radicalize before we take their claims seriously?”

One’s level of disaffection is not the gauge by which to measure the validity of his grievances. People as depraved as Johnson and Long will always find justification for their misdeeds. I haven’t the slightest interest in why they were disaffected. My only desire is to oppose and defeat anyone who might choose to imitate them.