The no-knock warrant is perhaps the most odious of all law enforcement tools. Initially conceived and justified as an extraordinary measure designed to protect police from well-armed suspects holed up within vibrant drug operations, as well as a means to seize evidence and deny major dealers opportunities to flush product into city sewage systems, it has proliferated exponentially through the decades, as local SWAT teams looked for more to do than confronting too infrequent hostage situations. The numbers tell the story.
A plethora of reliable studies confirm no-knock warrants have increased near twentyfold since the Reagan “war on drugs” days, from about 3000 in 1981 to more than 50K per year currently. Indeed, in Baltimore as one example, two-thirds of the city’s SWAT deployments are to support no-knock drug raids. Predictably, a disproportionate rate of the chaotic collateral damage such tactics produce is suffered by minorities. From 2010 through 2016, no-knocks led to the deaths of at least 31 civilians, half of that total were minorities. Black suspects were the targets of 42 percent of SWAT-supported raids, Hispanics another 12 percent.
Make no mistake, as one department after another has militarized operations, and hired battle-hardened armed-service veterans, ramming down doors has become more rule than exception. The fact SWAT members are almost always unfamiliar with the suspects involved, and quite literally are on the scene to overpower anyone they encounter assures a wide berth for tragedy. To view such an operation is to pray it never comes rolling up your driveway. Shoot first, worry later is a non-hyperbolic description of the sensibilities on display; there is no room for error. Up to here and now that calculus appears to be one law enforcement throughout the country has been able to live with, even as too many within their sights were not so lucky.
The operation that killed Breonna Taylor was apparently not supported by SWAT members. Nevertheless, the plain clothes detectives, in possession of a no-knock warrant that may or may not have been obtained legally, were as clueless as they were dangerous. She was killed for nothing, an innocent victim of shoddy and reckless police work. Asleep when they came a-ramming with no justification whatsoever, she was shot eight times and lay unattended until she passed. The posse and its superiors circled the wagons almost immediately, blaming their firing squad on the response of Taylor’s boyfriend, who pulled his fully licensed hand gun to confront unidentified mayhem coming through the front door. He stood his ground! A coroner intent on playing ball made clear later that Taylor “died almost immediately,” as if that justified not doing a thing to help an innocent woman you just sprayed with bullets.
One of Fox/AM’s most loathsome activities is the dependable tendency to sully the reputation of any black victim of police brutality. Sure as the sunrise Rush will tell his dittoheads Eric Garner deserved what he got because he was “breaking the law” – selling odd cigarettes. Bill O’Reilly did his best to make George Zimmerman the martyr instead of Trayvon Martin because “somebody punched him in the face.” To Sean Hannity it was more outrageous Philando Castile’s girlfriend documented his murder by cop than the crime itself:
“….he’s shot by the policeman, and she’s live facetiming this thing to the world, commenting on it — I’m just like, how about helping the person that’s been shot? We’ll figure out the particulars later, but it was more important I guess to get the video.”
Her “comments” were screams of anguish. That Trump’s appendage wouldn’t hesitate to say such an outrageously cruel thing, even as the video itself portrays shock and grief near too much to watch, is no surprise and only further illuminates his Goebbelsesque skill set. Yet and still, it seems even Hannity doesn’t want to mess with Breonna Taylor.
While protesters across the nation entreat us to “say her name,” Hannity is keeping quiet on the subject, a near unheard of occurrence. In fact, across the nihilist media universe there is similar silence on the topic. Which is odd considering no camera footage is available, opening up an endless landscape for false insinuations which Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin usually love to bury their snouts in. Moreover, Taylor’s boyfriend did actually shoot at officers, winging one, convinced they were home invaders. Plenty of ammunition for the usual smears and blame-the-victim revisionism. Regardless, the fact prosecutors dropped charges against him reeks of a desire for sweeping things under the rug.
That nobody on the MAGA television or radio dial sees any upside to defending Louisville’s finest says much about how indefensibly egregious Taylor’s killing was, and only adds to the anger that, after more than four months, little in the way of justice has been meted out. Slow rolling things won’t work on this one; nobody is forgetting about her anytime soon.
The investigation into Breonna Taylor’s killing is headed by Kentucky’s first Black Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, a Republican enthusiastically endorsed by Trump and Mitch McConnell, a former employer. Where that leaves justice for Breonna Taylor is not a promising place. Thus far only one detective has been fired, and any chance of criminal charges gets more remote with the time Cameron appears glad to let pass without results.
As unconvincing as Taylor’s killers are, their word is not disputed by camera footage they don’t have any good explanation for not providing. Whether Cameron feels his political viability rests with pleasing “all lives matter” sensibilities his primary benefactors demand isn’t anything he wants to boast about. Of course, sadly that doesn’t mean it won’t be more determinative to Breonna getting or not getting her day in court.
Before Breonna Taylor there was Bounkham Phonesavanh, all 19 months of him. On May 28, 2014 at 2:25 am, a Cornelia, Georgia SWAT team executed a no-knock warrant on a family residence. Not a trace of drugs or contraband found, but a flash-bang stun grenade was lobbed into a play pen little “Baby Bou Bou” slumbered soundly in. It exploded and severely burned the baby’s face and chest, while also causing “a complex laceration of the nose, upper lip and face; 20% of the right upper lip missing; the external nose being separated from the underlying bone; and a large avulsion burn injury to the chest with a resulting left pulmonary contusion and sepsis.” The injuries were so extensive and painful, the infant was placed in a medically induced coma and required numerous surgeries costing in excess of a million dollars to perform.
Although the family eventually settled for $3.6 million in civil damages, nobody involved in the raid was convicted of wrongdoing. Local grand juries refused to indict, and when federal prosecutors brought charges against one of the deputies, a jury refused to convict on all counts, including that she lied to obtain the, you guessed it, no-knock warrant!
If the murder of George Floyd lit the match, the extinguishing of Breonna Taylor’s promising life now primes the pump for national protests against a status quo that’s not working, unmistakably illuminating the crossroads we have arrived at. Her case checks all the boxes of change we can no longer ignore. In Kentucky, Cameron and McConnell may believe the flood waters will ebb without action… they won’t.
Justice for Breonna means criminal proceedings for her killers, whether their union, or Trump, likes it or not. Recognizing the value of good policing is not a zero-sum equation with punishing its worst actors; we are not less safe because bad cops are prosecuted for outrageous conduct. Equally important is recognizing that vehicles for abuse like no-knock warrants and chokeholds are bad ideas that need to end yesterday. Louisville’s city council passed “Breonna’s Law,” which does away with no-knock warrants. Last time I checked they were still a going concern. Should enough councils across America stand up to law-and-order opportunists and follow Louisville’s lead, that will be a tangible sign of progress. Personally, I can live with SWAT teams getting bored with less to do. More importantly, so will young EMTs and slumbering infants. BC