An incident report from the shooting of Breonna Taylor is mostly blank and inaccurate. Fox News. Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by Louisville Kentucky police, who were executing a "no-knock" warrant on her house after her boyfriend called 911 and opened fire on the cops, wounding one of them. The incident report claimed that Taylor wasn't injured, though she was shot eight times and that there was no forced entry even though the police broke down their door. Though nobody has been charged in the incident, the three detectives involved in the shootout have been reassigned and the detective that applied for the warrant was as well.
My Comment:
The Breonna Taylor shooting is one of the more sympathetic ones to come out of the Black Lives Matter movement. Unlike most of the flagship victims of the movement, Taylor was not a criminal or even involved in criminal activity, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Wikipedia has more background on the case here. In short, the detectives were looking for a pair of suspects that had visited Taylor's home and packages had been delivered there that the police took for drugs. No drugs were found. When the raid happened, the suspects were already in custody and the detectives claim they were unaware.
What happened during the shooting are mostly agreed upon. The police knocked on the door and Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, a licensed gun owner, retrieved his firearm and called 911 before opening fire on the detectives as they broke into the house. Walker hit one of the detectives while they shot and killed Taylor after hitting her eight times.
The main dispute in this case is if the detectives identified themselves as police and whether or not Walker could hear them. The 911 calls support Walker's claims that he never heard the police identify themselves as officers and that he assumed it was a home invasion. Without that information, Walker was justified in firing in self defense. The police claim they did identify themselves.
What's my take on this case? I think it's pretty clear that Walker was justified in firing. The police should have made more of an effort to ensure that the people in that apartment knew that it was the police that were out there and it was only reasonable to retrieve a firearm if they thought someone was breaking in.
However, I think it's also clear that the police screwed up beyond that. For one thing, I don't know why they would need a no knock warrant in this case regardless. There is always a chance of people destroying evidence but given the circumstances, it was stupid to take this level of risk.
Furthermore, it seems pretty clear that the cops were not on the ball here. It's absolutely insane that the incident report was mostly blank. In an incident where an innocent civilian was killed you would think that the police would have their incident reports up to snuff. They had to know that there was going to be outrage in this case, you would think they have every t crossed and every i dotted, but I guess not.
Regardless of justification of the raid or if Walker was justified in shooting or not, it's pretty clear that the detectives were not justified in shooting Taylor. She wasn't a threat and was unarmed and she wasn't the one that shot at the cops.
Should the police detectives be charged in this case? I'm not sure. I'm not an expert on Kentucky law and I'm not sure if the detectives have a case for self defense or not. I don't think that they killed Taylor out of spite and I think they were responding to Walker's shots and that alone. I do think that they did something terrible but I also don't think that people should go to prison for self defense, even if they massively screwed up in this case.
However, I certainly don't think Walker should go to prison. He made a good faith mistake here, as evidenced by the 911 calls, and I don't think someone should go to prison because the police screwed up. Any reasonable person would assume that it was a criminal breaking in if their door got knocked in, not the police, and would be justified in arming themselves and opening fire. Thankfully, the charges against him have been dropped and it's unlikely they will be brought up again.
Black Lives Matter have taken this case as one of their flagpoles in this round of protests/riots and I think out of the three main cases, this one is far more sympathetic to their cause than the other two. Even though I now think that the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery cases are exampled of bad police procedure and actual racism respectively, they were both criminals that brought on their own deaths. I have almost no sympathy for either of them. Taylor, and also Walker, were actual victims of police misconduct and are dramatically more sympathetic than Floyd and Arbery, which makes me wonder why those cases when viral when the Taylor case has mostly been ignored by the media.
I do think that no-knock raids are mostly a bad idea. I can see it in certain circumstances, like when trying to apprehend a murderer, but in most cases the potential for incidents like this is too high for it to be worth it. I would have rather have drug cases fall apart if it means that we won't see people killed who think they are defending their homes. And regardless, the police bungled it in this case.
All this being said, I don't think this case actually helps the cause of Black Lives Matter. Talyor wasn't killed because she was black, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and she had some shady friends that got her in trouble. The cops screwed up but not because of racial animus. They just screwed up and someone happened to die because of it, it's not due to racism as far as I'm aware.
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