Black Lives Matter has touted Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police last March, as another victim of police racism. But was she?
Much of what Black Lives Matter and other Leftist activist groups have told us about the case turns out to have been false, including claims that police went to the wrong apartment and that they were executing a “no knock” warrant, and did not announce themselves before entering Taylor’s apartment. In fact, the police went where they intended to go, and they knocked and announced themselves before forcing entry.
Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old hospital emergency-room technician who hoped to become a nurse. But Taylor was involved with a man named Jamarcus Glover, a 30-year-old twice-convicted drug dealer, and was frequently around the edges of Glover’s illegal activities.
Shortly after they first became a couple in 2016, Taylor agreed to rent a car for Glover’s use; A man was found shot to death behind the steering wheel of that rented car, and drugs were found in it. Although Glover was never charged in that case, he was later arrested on drug charges, and, on at least two occasions, Taylor arranged bail for him and one of his accomplices.
A few weeks before the March raid, when Glover was in custody after another arrest, Taylor and Glover were recorded exchanging intimacies on the telephone. Police surveillance also established that Glover made regular visits to Taylor’s apartment.
Glover was operating a series of “trap houses” for stashing illegal drugs. In one such house, police observed narcotics pick-ups, had informant information describing crack sales, and executed search warrants that yielded crack cocaine, eight firearms, and a surveillance system — commonly used by drug distribution organizations to defeat police detection.
After Glover was released on bail, surveillance placed his car at Ms. Taylor’s apartment on six occasions over the next couple of months. Taylor’s car was seen near a trap house associated with Glover several times.
Police also had evidence that Glover used Taylor’s address to receive parcels sent by mail. He was seen leaving her apartment carrying a package in mid-January. As of late February, two weeks before the warrant was executed, Glover listed Taylor’s apartment as his home address.
The search warrant for Taylor’s premises, seeking drugs and drug money, was based upon this series of contacts between Glover and Taylor.
On the night police executed the warrant at Ms. Taylor’s apartment, they also searched other locations associated with Glover’s drug operation, and found a table covered in drugs packaged for sale, including a plastic bag containing cocaine and fentanyl.
In a series of phone calls made just hours after Taylor’s death as Glover was trying raise money for bail, he told someone that he had left $14,000 in cash with Taylor. “Bre been having all my money,” he claimed. Later the same day he told another associate that he had left money at Taylor’s place.
Clearly, there was reason to believe that drugs and/or drug money was being stored in Taylor’s apartment.
Taylor’s family maintains that her relationship with Glover was over by the time the search warrant was executed on March 13, and indeed she seems to have become involved with her new boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, whom she had met when they were both college students.
On March 13, after work, she met Walker for dinner, and they returned to her apartment, where they watched television and went to sleep after midnight. The police did not see Walker enter the apartment and expected that Taylor would be there alone.
At about 12:40 a.m., Sergeant John Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove knocked on the door and announced themselves as police (there is an independent witness of this fact, another resident of the apartment complex who was awakened by the knocking). Taylor and Walker were startled out of their sleep. Walker, who was a licensed owner of a nine-millimeter Glock, picked up his weapon, and he and Taylor went through the bedroom door and into a dark hallway between the bedroom and the front door.
As Sergeant Mattingly burst through the front door, Walker fired his pistol, striking Mattingly in the leg and severely wounding him. Mattingly and Cosgrove returned fire into the dark hallway in the direction the shots came from. When the screaming stopped, the smoked cleared, and the lights came on, Walker was unharmed but Taylor had been struck six times. FBI ballistics experts eventually determined that Cosgrove fired the fatal shot.
(Another officer, Brett Hankison, was in the parking lot outside the apartment, and began firing recklessly when he heard shots fired; he sprayed the patio and a window with ten bullets, but did not hit anyone. Some of his rounds entered the neighboring apartment but, again, did not hit anyone. Hankison, who had a spotty disciplinary record, was fired, and has now been charged with “wanton endangerment.”)
No charges have been filed against Kenneth Walker, who claimed he did not hear the police announce themselves and thought Jamarcus Glover was breaking into the apartment. No charges were filed against Mattingly or Cosgrove, who were returning fire in self-defense.
Again, this was not a “no knock” situation; the police did knock and announce themselves. The police have been criticized for executing the search warrant so late at night, when the resident(s) of the apartment were likely to be asleep, groggy as they were waking up, and perhaps not able to hear the police announce themselves, or comprehend the situation. But police argue that late night raids also interfere with people’s efforts to destroy incriminating evidence. The City of Louisville, Kentucky, has reportedly settled the Taylor family’s civil wrongful death case for $12 million, which seems generous given the facts.
By now it should be obvious to the reader that this was not an incident of police brutality or of racism. The police were executing a search warrant signed by a magistrate and apparently supported by probable cause based upon Jamarcus Glover’s ties to the apartment. In any case, the police were entitled to rely on the signed warrant. They were fired upon, and one of them was struck and wounded; they were entitled to respond with lethal force in self-defense.
Breonna Taylor’s death was a tragedy. But the idea that this was a racial incident is risible nonsense, dependent on notions from Marxist Critical Race Theory, which teaches that any and every interaction involving both blacks and whites is suffused with racism, and is a racial incident by definition.
The rent-a-mobs now rioting and burning down Louisville are angered that the police were not charged in Taylor’s death, but to do so would have been a gross, blatant miscarriage of justice. In effect, they are demanding not justice, but injustice. They are thugs demanding thuggery, criminals demanding official criminality. Two officers have been shot during the rioting.
It is unfortunate that the Adventist Church officials who have cited, in official statements, the Breonna Taylor case as an example of racial injustice, or the supposed “systemic racism” of American society, did not keep their powder dry. They ought to be deterred from making a statement prematurely by the fact that past supposed examples of racism and police animus against black people almost always evaporate under scrutiny. Better if we would heed the counsel of Solomon--“the first to plead his case seems right, until his neighbor comes and cross-examines him”—and wait for the justice system to grind through to a conclusion, before we issue a statement.
Better yet, do not even issue statements on stories like this. There is really no need. In a nation that, far from being systemically racist, deeply despises racism, no one could reasonably assume that the SDA Church is racist if it does not weigh in on every isolated incident.