Today’s New York Times runs an eighteen minute video that reconstructs the moments that led up to the killing of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police. Because none of the officers wore body cameras (a violation of department policy), the video reconstruction came together from details of the investigation, grand jury testimony, thousands of documents and crime scene photos that were used to create a 3D model of Breonna’s apartment, as well as interviews with officers who took part in the raid, and neighbors who witnessed parts of the raid.
The video is disturbing for multiple reasons, the worst part of which is the brutal death of an innocent young woman. The police were acting on bad intelligence, for starters, as the actual suspected drug dealer was in a house about ten miles away from Breonna’s apartment (the NYT video also shows that raid, handled by a SWAT team, go down professionally and without incident).
Secondly, the officers participating in the raid on Breonna’s apartment made fatally bad tactical errors, specifically failing to identify themselves as police officers when they were banging on the door in the middle of the night. Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend, who was in possession of a legal firearm, was certainly within his rights under Kentucky’s stand your ground laws to use his weapon against unidentified intruders breaking down his door.
Only a few seconds into the video it becomes abundantly clear what’s problematic with policing in America. The seven officers, who were not only acting on faulty intelligence, are armed to the teeth. They were so geared up they looked like they were ready to raid the Bin Laden compound, not an ordinary apartment building where multiple families with children live.
And here’s why they went to Breonna’s apartment in the first place: detectives thought that maybe Breonna’s ex-boyfriend might be stashing cash and drugs at her apartment. They weren’t even thinking there were weapons. Seven heavily armed police officers for one 26-year old woman with no weapons. It’s reasonable by any standard to question whether that’s a worthwhile use of a city’s resources. It’s also reasonable to ask if all that weaponry and all the things that could go wrong is worth the risk to the lives of people sleeping in that apartment building.
After banging on the door 12:08 a.m. and failing to identify themselves, the officers gave Breonna a woefully inadequate 45 seconds to answer her door. During those 45 seconds Breonna and her boyfriend threw on their clothes and yelled repeatedly, ‘who is it? who’s there?’ to no avail. At the 45-second mark, officers busted the door off its hinges.
Breonna’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, grabbed his gun and fired a single round toward the officers but in a downward trajectory—more or less a warning shot to intruders who just busted the door off the hinges, demonstrating remarkable presence of mind and restraint. The officers, on the other hand, seemed to lack any presence of mind. In a remarkable display of policing incompetence, two of the officers stepped into what professionals call the ‘fatal funnel,’ the doorway of the apartment where there is no cover, and start firing rounds blindly (‘blindly’ by the officers own accounting). One of the officers, Detective Cosgrove, fired until he was out of ammunition—16 rounds. Some of the rounds went into the apartment upstairs where there was a two-year old girl sleeping.
In under one minute, 22 rounds were fired. Six went into Breonna’s body. As Breonna lay dying and her boyfriend was yelling for help, there was a brief pause in shooting, and then for no apparent reason, the police began firing blindly again into the apartment—this time not only through the front door but through the living room and bedroom windows. Some of these bullets went all the way through Breonna’s apartment and into the apartment next door, where a five-year old boy was sleeping. In total, 32 rounds were fired into Breonna’s apartment and neighboring apartments.
At this point, still feeling like they were in jeopardy, the officers at the scene called in SWAT backup. Forty (you read that right, 40) police vehicles and a SWAT team show up at Breonna apartment building. The SWAT team had their body cameras on.
Breonna’s boyfriend is out of the apartment now, hands in the air, wearing just a t-shirt and sweats, visibly unarmed. One of the officers asks, ‘have you been hit by a bullet?’ Walker responds, ‘no.’ Another officer says, ‘that’s unfortunate.’ With an abundance of weaponry trained on the unarmed man, officers scream, ‘walk backwards [towards us].’ Walker responds with, ‘I’m scared.’ One of the officers responds: ‘Yeah, right, you’re scared.’ Then another officer, who’s holding back a highly agitated, snarling police dog, threatens to turn the dog loose on Walker, who continues to walk backward with his hands in the air. Walker cries, ‘my girlfriend is dead.’ A female police officer responds, ‘I don’t give a—‘ but stops herself short.
Finally, after 30 minutes, EMTs are allowed access to Breonna. The cameras of SWAT team members who are now in the apartment show them discovering bullet holes everywhere. They see Breonna’s EMT uniform. A SWAT officer is overheard saying, ‘this is the one [raid] they didn’t need us to do.’ A very troubling revelation: what this SWAT team member is saying, in other words, is that they knew this was a low-risk situation going in, underscoring how grotesquely incompetent and reckless with human life the Louisville police were. That was the last thing picked up before body cameras went off.
Dale Massey was the commander leading the SWAT team that arrived on scene after the shooting. This 20-year veteran of the force was interviewed as part of the investigation. He spoke of the deadly incompetence of Louisville police. The bad intelligence, the complete lack of coordination with SWAT, the total bungling of an unwarranted raid. ‘You announce, you knock, and you give people ample time to leave,’ Massey said. ‘No amount of dope is worth a human life,’ Massey told investigators. BTW, there were no drugs or stashes of cash found at Breonna’s apartment.
For those who doesn’t understand the #DefundThePolice movement, this is what’s at the heart of the matter. American cities divert an absurd amount of money and resources to police departments, and this is the result. Overarmed, undertrained, unempathetic, jittery and incompetent police officers who too often take innocent lives (usually the lives of people of color), often posing more of a lethal threat to society than the criminals they’re pursuing. Forty police vehicles? 32 rounds, one dead 26-year old woman? And it was just mere luck the two small children in apartments next door weren’t killed? All this for cash and some drugs that never were?
As SWAT commander Massey said, no amount of dope is worth a human life. Let’s defund these atrocities now, and reroute that money into something befitting a civilized, decent society. Mental health care. Drug rehab programs. Job training. You name it. Anything is better than this.
