In the early morning hours of March 13, three officers from the Louisville Police Department broke into 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor’s home under the suspicion Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, was using the residence as a drug distribution base.
The officers never announced themselves, according to no less than 12 witness accounts. After Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot at one of the officers in self-defense, the officers retaliated by firing a total of 32 bullets in the residence. Of those, six hit Breonna Taylor. She died on the scene.
On Sept. 23, it was announced none of the officers would be charged in relation to her death.
This was a decision that surprised no one but angered almost everyone.
One of the officers, Brett Hankinson, was indicted for “wanton endangerment to the first degree” for shooting several bullets through the wall into a neighboring apartment. The other two, Jon Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, received no punishment at all.
The reaction from the political right was equally grim. Shortly after the announcement, popular conservative commentator Tomi Lahren tweeted, “It is NOT an officer’s duty to gamble with his/her life so you can happily and comfortably resist arrest”—completely omitting the fact that Breonna Taylor wouldn’t have even had time to “resist arrest” before she was murdered in her home.
Some argue Taylor’s death was warranted because her boyfriend fired the first shot—but what would they have done in his situation? Armed strangers broke into his home in the middle of the night, in plainclothes, allegedly without ever identifying themselves as police.
It was a clear case of self-defense. Yet those who defend the officers are eager to abandon all evidence and reason in favor of blind devotion to an authoritarian police state.
The police have never been adequately prosecuted in America, but there was hope that would change this time around. Taylor, an innocent woman, was killed by the police just moments after waking up in her own home. What more evidence could a jury need to rule that she had been murdered?
Yet the legal system ultimately ruled property damage to be a worse offense than murder. To really make it clear the legal system only works for a select few, Hankinson’s bail was set at the laughably low amount of $15,000.
The day before the verdict was announced, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency in anticipation of protests he knew would come.
Officials knew the courts were never going to hold the officers accountable. But instead of using their power to push for justice reform and remove the ridiculous safeguards that protect police from the rule of law, they preferred to incite violence by deploying military tanks on their own rightfully angry citizens.
After months of protests and online outrage calling for #JusticeforBreonnaTaylor, this court decision was a depressing reminder of the unwarranted authority blindly awarded to police, particularly when it comes to issues of racist misconduct.
This was reflected in an email Sergeant Mattingly sent to his Louisville Police Department colleagues, in which he wrote that by shooting an innocent Black woman in her home he had done “the legal, moral and ethical thing that night.”
Our country has somehow accepted that crooked officers can walk free while their victims lie dead without justice. Until the U.S. justice system is reformed, I hope the protests in Louisville never stop.
Cécile Girard is a 20-year-old psychology junior from Lake Charles.
