2020: Breonna Taylor
Photographic portrait of Breonna Taylor, during a graduation ceremony in Louisville, Kentucky.
Source: Wikipedia
In the late spring and summer of 2020, two African American deaths led to national and international protests against police violence and systemic racism.
In both cases, the deaths demonstrated violent police practices against Black citizens and glimpses of the excessive use of force often experienced by African Americans at the hands of police.
On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker were sleeping at her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky when police knocked on the door and then forced entry using a battering ram (Duvall and Costello, 2020). The Louisville Metropolitan Police Depart used a “no-knock” search warrant to enter Taylor’s residence shortly after midnight; there is some dispute whether the police identified themselves, which is particularly important as they entered the premises in “plain clothes.” Upon hearing the loud noise, Taylor and Walker yelled “Who is it?” several times; Walker claims that there was no answer, while the police claim that they had identified themselves. According to a New York Times investigation, “In interviews with nearly a dozen neighbors, only one person said he heard the officers shout ‘Police!’ a single time” (Callimachi, 2020). Thinking that there were intruders and possibly thieves in the apartment, Kenneth Walker grabbed his gun and fired what he called a “warning shot” claiming in interviews and testimony to have aimed his gun at the floor. The bullet hit an officer in the leg, at which point officers opened fire indiscriminately in response. Not only did the officers shoot into Taylor’s unlit apartment from the entryway, but one ran out of the apartment to also open fire through the patio door and window. In the chaotic scene, police officers fired at least 32 rounds into Breonna Taylor’s apartment and the adjoining apartments (Callimachi, 2020). In the aftermath of the flurry of police bullets, the unarmed Breonna Taylor lay in the hallway of her apartment with six gunshot wounds; she was declared dead at the scene.
The incident drew national attention because of the overwhelming and indiscriminate violent response from police officers.
Their actions were an obvious danger to public safety, and further demonstrated systemic and procedural failures with law enforcement and criminal justice systems.
First, the “no-knock” warrant was obtained to investigate Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, and the evidence used to justify such a warrant was later found to be tenuous at best; since the police officers were only meant to search for any packages remaining from Taylor’s ex, the late-night, forced-entry search was clearly excessive (Callimachi, 2020). It’s also worth noting that after the events that resulted in Breonna Taylor’s death that police never actually completed the search for packages detailed in the warrant.
Second, Kenneth Walker’s “warning shot” was entirely within his legal rights in the state of Kentucky which is a “stand-your-ground” state allowing the use of lethal force to defend oneself and home, and this is especially true as “by nearly all accounts” the police did not provide sufficient announcement of their identity. Stand-your-ground laws were used by George Zimmerman to justify his lethal use of force “in self defense” against the teenage Trayvon Martin in 2012, yet the officers immediately arrested and detained Kenneth Walker, even as police body cameras show him crying and telling the officers to help Breonna (Callimachi, 2020).
Third, the initial investigations revealed substantial irregularities, including evidence of what appears to be a cover up. The four-page incident report released three months after Breonna’s death was not only sparse in details, it was notably factually incorrect, “listing her injuries as ‘none’ even though she was shot… and died on her hallway floor in a pool of blood” and indicating that no forced entry had occurred, even though police used a battering ram to punch through her apartment door (Duvall, 2020). Additionally, in July of 2020, prosecutors attempted to change the narrative surrounding Breonna Taylor by attempting to tie her to her ex-boyfriend’s drug activities–despite there not being evidence to support such a connection. In fact, “Jamarcus Glover, the focus of a series of Louisville police raids, including one in which officers shot and killed [his ex-girlfriend] Breonna Taylor, was offered a plea bargain… if he would say that Taylor was a member of his ‘organized crime syndicate’” (Riley, 2020). Despite Glover and others’ repeated consistent testimony that Taylor had nothing to do with his illegal activities, prosecutors offered a plea deal so enticing that it could have meant probation rather than jail time. Several commentators on the potential plea deal, including attorneys from the Kentucky Innocence Project, have gone so far as to call this deal a “bribe" in their attempted smear campaign against Breonna Taylor (Riley, 2020). Glover did not accept the plea deal, nor did he ever change his story that Breonna was not involved in his activities.
Unlike the intentional convoluting of information that occurred by the police department and the prosecutor’s office with Michael Brown, the intense national scrutiny surrounding Breonna Taylor’s narrative allowed it to remain relatively straightforward as an example of the injustices and structural inequities experienced by Black Americans.