The idea behind a "no-knock warrant," such as the Louisville police executed at the apartment of Breonna Taylor shortly after midnight last March 13, is to keep anyone inside from hiding or destroying evidence while the cops wait for the door to be answered. This must also explain why, as in the Taylor case, the warrant may be executed in the middle of the night, when it's unlikely anyone would see the police approaching. But isn't it obvious that these details, together with the fact that this is America so everyone has a gun, make what happened next entirely predictable? One of the points of contention seems to be whether the cops announced themselves before knocking the door off its hinges with a battering ram. They say they did. Taylor's boyfriend, with whom she was in bed sleeping when the warrant was executed, says they did not, and neighbors in the apartment building concur. But it's the middle of the night. The cops arrive and, let us say for the sake of argument, announce themselves and their intentions. Of course the occupants are sleeping so there is no response. Then the cops start battering the door down. That'll wake you up. From the perspective of Taylor and her boyfriend, a home invasion was in progress. There is a panicked 9-1-1 call to prove that. But the boyfriend has a gun and is licensed to carry. He shoots, the cops return fire, more than twenty rounds, and Taylor dies after being struck eight times.
She wasn't even the principal target of the investigation. Police thought her former boyfriend was dealing drugs and using her apartment to receive his packages. They told the judge who signed the warrant that the postal inspector had verified that their suspect received packages at Taylor's address. After the tragedy, the postal inspector asserted this was not true. There were no drugs or packages or large sums of cash found in the apartment. The boyfriend who shot at police was arrested but subsequently released after journalists revealed more about what seems to have happened. The cops executing the warrant filed an "incident report" that was mostly blank, although they did check "No" next to "Forced entry?" and stated "None" for "Injuries." Do they distinguish "injuries" from "corpses"? I don't know. When the report was released, the Louisville mayor apologized and said it was the kind of thing that "eroded confidence" in the police. You have to be smart to be elected mayor!
Last week, the Louisville city council adopted a law banning "no-knock" warrants. Wonderful, but I wonder whether they've considered that the details of the Taylor case, so far as they are known, tend to elucidate social science research indicating that carrying a gun for personal protection is hazardous to your health. Breonna Taylor would be alive if her boyfriend had been just "a good guy," but instead he was "a good guy with a gun."
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