The media, unfortunately, have linked these cases of police killings, even though they have almost nothing in common. And now, unsurprisingly, a Louisville grand jury has failed to indict any of the officers involved in the no-knock raid that led to Ms. Taylor's death (by contrast, the officer that killed Mr. Floyd was quickly and rightly indicted, although he is planing an aggressive defense). The failure to indict any officer for the killing of Ms. Taylor is unsurprising because: (1) a judge had authorized the raid and the warrant to search the apartment because of Ms. Taylor's sometime-boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer, and (2) when the police entered the apartment, a different boyfriend (then at home with Ms. Taylor) fired on the police (he did not know they were police), wounding one officer; the police returned fire, resulting in Ms. Taylor's death. On these facts, it's hard to see how any officer was culpable for Ms. Taylor's death. Louisville subsequently banned no-knock raids, which undoubtedly contributed mightily to the cascading calamity resulting in her death.
The current attacks on police by "enlightened" liberal folks have a lot in common, I've come to think, with the favorite pet idea of billionaire busybodies and right-wing pundits for "reforming" big city public schools, namely, to give teachers better "incentives" to do a better job. In both cases, the thought seems to be that blame for the problems we observe (police killings, poor student performance) can be laid at the door of the actors (the police, the teachers), without any regard for the circumstances under which these actors perform their jobs (extreme urban poverty and violence affect both). Recall this observation from the recent New Yorker article about police unions:
According to Paul Hirschfield, a Rutgers sociologist who has written about international law-enforcement practice, the difference [in rates of police killings in the U.S. vs. Europe] is partly in the basic work environment. “American police encounter conditions that are more like Latin America than northern Europe,” he told me. “These vast inequalities, the history of enslavement and conquest, a weak social safety net. The decentralization. Police are more likely to encounter civilians with firearms here...."
Since that is the reality in the U.S.--extreme poverty and desperation, combined with a proliferation of weapons--the real question has to be what institutional and systemic reforms will minimize situations ripe for tragedies like the killing of Ms. Taylor. Eliminating the no-knock raid is probably one, and the sociologist Randall Collins has identified some others. Of course, eliminating poverty and restricting access to firearms would be even more important, but that would require real political and economic change in the country that elected Donald Trump.
(Thanks to Paul Morrow for a small factual correction on an earlier version.)
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