“I don’t know what’s happening,” Kenneth Walker said on a recorded call to 911. “Someone kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.”[1]
“I know we did the legal, moral and ethical thing that night,” Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly wrote in an email to fellow LPD officers.[2]
Yesterday, a grand jury in Louisville declined to press criminal charges against any of the officers who perpetrated the murder of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville apartment on March 13, 2020.[3] This is a description of the events, at its simplest: After midnight, while Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were in bed, police served a no-knock warrant. Their conduct sufficiently scared Walker into firing blindly in the dark at what he believed were intruders, and police responded with a storm of bullets in response.[4] In the months since Breonna Taylor became a household name, as calls for the arrest of the officers who shot her became a meme, you may have asked “Why?” For a murder that has become a focal point of a national discussion on police brutality, why has the legal establishment waited and waited to charge the officers for their heinous acts?
The answer is straightforward: because it was legal.
“I don’t know what’s happening. Someone kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.” – Kenneth Walker
On the night of March 13th, the police were executing a no-knock warrant.[5] The practice is about what it sounds – instead of knocking, announcing, and waiting for the inhabitants to come to the door – the warrant allows police to enter without announcing their presence. No knock warrants have been held legal since at least 1963, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that there are common exceptions to the knock and announce rule, such as a belief the suspect would destroy evidence.[6] Other “exigent circumstances” allowed are if doing so would jeopardize officer safety, if they are in the midst of an emergency, or if knocking would be a futile gesture.
This is all logical – from the police officer’s point of view. Though the Fourth Amendment was originally crafted with the rights of citizens in mind, it has been steadily eroded by a legislature and judiciary that has put law enforcement first. Law enforcement in both meanings; the officers of the law, in whose name the protections of the Fourth Amendment have been reduced for officer safety, AND the enforcement of laws, specifically those authorizing the drug war.
The drug war, which has been waged by presidents of both parties continuously since Richard Nixon, encourages an “us versus them” mentality by demonizing drug users and dealers as subversive elements in society, to be rooted out like an Al-Qaeda cell. Police officers are armed like soldiers, empowered by the law, and immunized from consequences. Raids like the Louisville raid are not rare – rather they are disturbingly common and have been for decades.[7]
“I know we did the legal, moral and ethical thing that night,” – Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly
Even if officers are charged, which they were not in this case, prosecutors have a steep hill to climb to obtain a conviction. Kentucky’s murder statute requires a defendant to have the conscious objective to kill.[8] Because the officers were fired on first, when Walker fired a warning shot through the door, the return fire was justified as a matter of training and self-defense.
There’s a self-fulfilling logic to the encounter: the officers are conducting a no-knock raid because they believe the suspects are dangerous, the suspects are scared and startled by the raid, and open fire in defense, and the police are endangered as a result. No matter the notion that a person’s home is their castle – we have long given up the ghost that police are to respect our private spaces.
One of the worst parts of growing up is realizing the promises of this country, of equality, freedom, and liberty, have been empty promises since the beginning. I, and many others, hold privacy, solitude, and safety as an implicit necessary piece of the American promise. The shooting of Taylor shows another way the America we believe exists is a fiction. The promise of the law is totally undermined in justifying the state-sanctioned murder of a citizen in her own bed.
Author’s Note: I normally focus this blog on areas of privacy that are more cutting edge, such as biometrics and internet data privacy. But the idea that a man’s home is his castle is maybe the origination of the entire concept of privacy that all other rights flow from. If the home is not private, then where else is? As you can tell I am thoroughly disturbed by the events from Louisville. If you are interested in this subject, I recommend Radley Balko’s book Rise of the Warrior Cop. It explores this issue in depth while providing a tremendous history on the subject in a readable and engaging manner. It felt truly eerie to finish this book yesterday as the grand jury results were announced.
Today’s somber tweet of the week:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html
[2] https://twitter.com/robferdman/status/1308389439102738432?s=20
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/breonna-taylor-charges-louisville.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
[4] The New York Times provides an excellent description of the facts:
Shortly after midnight on March 13, Louisville police officers executing a search warrant used a battering ram to enter the apartment of Ms. Taylor…The police had been investigating two men who they believed were selling drugs out of a house that was far from Ms. Taylor’s home. But a judge had also signed a warrant allowing the police to search Ms. Taylor’s residence because the police said they believed that one of the men had used her apartment to receive packages.
Ms. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, had been in bed, but got up when they heard a loud banging at the door. Mr. Walker said he and Ms. Taylor both called out, asking who was at the door. Mr. Walker later told the police he feared it was Ms. Taylor’s ex-boyfriend trying to break in.
After the police broke the door off its hinges, Mr. Walker fired his gun once, striking Sergeant Mattingly in a thigh. The police responded by firing several shots, striking Ms. Taylor five times. One of the three officers on the scene, Detective Brett Hankison, who has since been fired, shot 10 rounds blindly into the apartment.
[5] Since the raid the Louisville city council has outlawed no knock raids. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2020/06/11/louisville-metro-council-votes-ban-no-knock-warrants-after-breonna-taylors-death/5342907002/
[6] Ker v. California, 374 U.S. 23 (1963)
[7] Many of these raids have been chronicled by journalist Radley Balko in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop, which provided the inspiration for this article.
[8] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/23/kentucky-self-defense-laws-homicide-charges-breonna-taylor-decision/3510392001/
Dumb Privacy Guy 