March 13th marked one year since Breonna Taylor, a black emergency medical technician, was shot and killed by Louisville police officers during a mishandled drug raid on her apartment. Officers had been executing a no-knock search warrant when Kenneth Walker, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, thinking they were intruders, shot one officer in the leg. In retaliation, the officers fired six shots at Ms. Taylor, leaving her dead.
Seeing as so much time has passed and multitudes of communities across the nation have held protests against the incident, one would think that we would have achieved some form of fulfilling justice for Ms. Taylor by now. I imagine that such justice would have partially alleviated the deep sense of grief and hopelessness that many of us have felt over the past year due to the countless black lives lost to police violence and, not to mention, the ever-present affliction of the global COVID-19 pandemic. But Ms. Taylor has yet to receive an adequate amount of justice and the wound feels as fresh as ever.
While Ms. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, and many others across the nation have consistently demanded the prosecution of all three officers involved in the incident, such requests are far from being fulfilled. The only legal charge that the Kentucky justice system has carried out in relation to the shooting is one that is completely unrelated to the actual endangerment of Ms. Taylor; Brett Hankison, a former Louisville detective involved in the raid, was indicted in September for three charges of wanton endangerment of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors, whose apartment was unintentionally hit as Hankison attempted to fire into Ms. Taylor’s apartment. With this lone indictment, the only bullets that have been legally declared unnecessary are the bullets that did not take Ms. Taylor’s life.
Detective Myles Cosgrove, one of the officers who shot Ms. Taylor, and Detective Joshua Jaynes, the officer who prepared the search warrant for the raid, have not received any indictments in relation to the incident. Both have merely been fired–– Cosgrove was terminated for firing too many rounds without acquiring a target, and Jaynes for exhibiting falsehoods in his writing of the warrant for the raid.
Knowing that the justice system has yet to charge any of the officers for invading Ms. Taylor’s home and killing her hurts to say the least. The thing about Ms. Taylor’s death is that the entire incident has always sounded so ridiculously absurd; from the dishonesty scattered throughout the warrant, to the inaccurate post-incident police report, to the fact that officers barged into the apartment plain-clothed in the middle of the night, irrationalities have shown up at every corner of the incident. With such malpractice, one would think that the justice system would, in some form, hold the officers legally accountable for the nonsensical shooting of Ms. Taylor; yet, they have not, and I can’t say I’m incredibly surprised about this outcome after the countless legal mistreatments of black women victims of police brutality.
According to the Washington Post database, about 272 women have been shot and killed by police in the U.S. since 2015, about 20 percent of which were black women–– which is disturbing, considering that black women only account for 13 percent of the women population. From 2015 to 2020, only two of those cases led to the officers involved being charged with manslaughter or murder. It is therefore clear that black women are not only getting fatally shot by police at higher rates than other women, but that their killers are also less likely to get indicted in cases where the amount of force used was unnecessary.
The American justice system has always failed black women–– there’s no doubt about that. But the question is if these systems will ever have the capacity to protect black women.
“Justice” is complicated. Of course I, and many others, are angry that the officers who killed Ms. Taylor have not been convicted; why wouldn’t we be, after repeatedly witnessing the painfully obvious racial bias in the American justice system and police forces. Why wouldn’t we be infuriated after being sold the highly regarded idea of American “justice for all” for so long? It is surely an injustice that black women victims of police violence are perpetually erased by legal systems, in relation to the high visibility of white victims.
Yet, I am simultaneously aware that there are structural reasons why the criminal justice system consistently fails black women. When the justice system so consistently displays an inability to seek justice in an equal manner across all citizens’ cases, it’s time to start questioning the credibility and purpose of the system itself. As Andrea Ritchie, author of “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color,” has asserted, the criminal justice system’s inequitable execution of justice “is part of a larger pattern, and if we don’t interrupt the pattern, we’re going to be in this position again and again and again.”
I also know that the prison industrial complex has shown itself to be remarkably ineffective in rehabilitating inmates; if the people that are being sent to prison are not treated humanely and with the ultimate goal of improved social reintegration, then I see no value in prisons at all. My goal is to stop patterns of violence, not to endlessly punish perpetrators with no resolution in sight.
Though it is of course frustrating to witness the justice system neglect the cases of Breonna Taylor and other black women victims of police violence, justice for Ms. Taylor cannot be as simple as getting her killers locked up in prison. I propose, as many others have, a different conception of what justice for Breonna Taylor would look like, straying from American criminal justice system-centered notions of the value.
Justice for Breonna Taylor, I imagine, would partly entail the defunding, rather than reforming, of police forces across the U.S. Police reform has again and again displayed its incapacity to lessen police violence, one such example being Minneapolis’ attempted reforms of its police department in 2015, which have failed to lessen the department’s habits of unreasonable violence.
Policing Policy Advisor, Paige Fernandez, articulates the logic behind defunding well when they say that “we must cut the astronomical amount of money that our governments spend on law enforcement and give that money to more helpful services like job training, counseling, and violence-prevention programs.” Money that would typically be used to promote the militarization of ineffective police forces could instead be funneled into other sectors of social welfare that are proven to actually make the world a safer place.
I believe that justice for Breonna Taylor would also, on a more fundamental level, necessitate the continued interrogation of existing police and justice systems. We must take a step back from the institutions of criminal justice that we have been conditioned to unquestioningly accept and examine their true functions; we must wonder why these systems persistently display less care for black women’s lives, why they seem to be immune to reform, and what other institutions, if any, could execute justice in a more successful fashion.
Our continued willingness to question these systems is the very essence of what justice for Breonna Taylor might look like. When we refuse to sit in complacency, we productively disrupt norms of violence and injustice, moving towards an imagined future in which we don’t have to get used to life-threatening inequity.
(Courtesy of Maria Oswalt via Unsplash)
Very educational thank you for that