What is justice for Breonna Taylor?

There’s a split in the state response to the killing of Breonna Taylor, who was at home in her bed when three officers with the Louisville Metro Police Department blindly fired 25 bullets into and around her apartment, striking her five times. Last week, the city agreed to pay Taylor’s family $12 million to settle a wrongful death suit. The settlement also came with a set of agreements about police reform, from establishing a new system to track use of force complaints to bringing more social workers into the department.
Then on Wednesday, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced that just one of the officers involved in the deadly no-knock raid on Taylor’s apartment would be charged: Brett Hankison, with three counts of “wanton endangerment.” Those charges, as Jamiles Lartey of the Marshall Project noted as the news broke, were each for shots that were not actually fired into Taylor’s apartment but neighboring ones. “Hankison was charged for his behavior that night,” he wrote. “He was not charged for shooting at, hitting, or killing Breonna Taylor.”

There’s the dissonance: On the official record, Taylor’s death was wrongful, but the men who killed her did not do anything wrong. These are different systems—a civil case, a grand jury—but the basic break in reality is still jarring. The criminal legal system concerns itself only with crime and illegality, both of which feel increasingly meaningless if they ever meant anything at all. Harm—the real thing that’s been done, which in this case was to steal a 26-year-old Black woman’s life in service of the drug war—means something, but the criminal system can’t account for it. It’s not part of the math.
The abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie wrote a prescient piece about all of this back in July, and I read it again after the charges came down. (Do you notice a trend of revisited readings in these newsletters? We are often in the same places again and again.) In cases where officers kill or otherwise harm people, prosecutions are unlikely; convictions even more so. “Since 2005 there have only been 110 prosecutions of police officers who shot people, while police have killed 1,000 people a year on average since 2014,” Kaba and Ritchie wrote. “There were convictions in less than 42 cases, usually on lesser charges.” These patterns remain largely unchanged despite unprecedented levels of public scrutiny, documentary evidence, and mass protest in response to police impunity. We are stuck somewhere; we know where we are stuck.

These cyclical demands for different outcomes, Kaba and Ritchie wrote, amount to asking the police to “stop being the police over and over again.” Abolition turns its attention toward a holistic process of repair and accountability. They wrote, in part:
Under this framework, there is no question Breonna’s family is entitled to accountability—including immediate termination of the officers involved in her killing, and banning them from any future position that would allow them to carry a weapon or hold a position of power that can be abused in the way they abused it in Breonna’s case. They are also entitled to a process through which the officers must hear and be accountable to their pain, know the full value of the life they took, and make amends to our collective satisfaction. Breonna’s family is entitled to repair—compensation for their pain and suffering, without the necessity of having to endure lengthy litigation during which their loved one’s reputation, history, associations, character will be assailed.
The call to defund the police is not synonymous with abolition, but it is a political necessity that starts us on the path to breaking the cycles we’re trapped in now. As my colleague Melissa Gira Grant wrote a few months back, it also lends itself well to an amorphous and fractured movement for accountability, which is the movement we have right now. (At protests this week in New York, chants of “defund the police” and “arrest killer cops” were shouted with equal force.) It’s true that full abolition of the prison industrial complex—the vision that organizers and scholars like Kaba and Ritchie work to build—is not yet a consensus position among the broader public, or even in liberal and left movements; but there is sizable enough support in many cases for reallocating funding away from policing and toward community resources like housing. It’s a place to begin.

In June, the Minneapolis City Council announced its nebulously defined intention to “disband” its police force. That feels very far away right now, and the developments that have disrupted and stalled that process in the months since reveal the complexities of the work ahead. Because to ask police to stop being the police is about more than just individual conduct or cases. Moving money away from police departments is a modest objective—particularly in a moment when state austerity is looking to make cuts to crucial services in the middle of a recession—but in fighting for it, we are still asking an institution that has slowly cannibalized other systems around it and remade them in its image to stop being itself. It doesn’t want to do that, and many of our elected officials are incapable of the resolve required for actual change. The summer has been agonizing and instructive on these points; none of it is easy work, but it remains necessary all the same. You can’t feed the thing that killed Breonna Taylor and then reprimanded itself for firing into some neighboring walls: You have to starve it.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor