Louisville reacts to arrest of four officers involved in death of Breonna Taylor

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."During a 2020 news conference to announce a grand jury’s findings, Cameron said jurors “agreed” that homicide charges were not warranted against the officers, because they were fired upon. That prompted three of the jurors to come forward and dispute Cameron’s account, arguing that Cameron’s staff limited their scope and wouldn’t let them consider harsher charges.

“The federal government had the guts to do what Daniel Cameron did not,” said Lonita Baker, one of the Taylor family’s attorneys. “The malfeasance that the Kentucky Attorney General’s office showed in this case shows that his political career needs to end now.”

Cameron said this week that some “want to use this moment to divide Kentuckians, misrepresent the facts of the state investigation and broadly impugn the character of our law enforcement.”

“I won’t participate in that sort of rancor,” he said in a news release. “It’s not productive.”

Another longtime activist, Tamika Mallory, moved to Louisville along with members of the social justice group Until Freedom more than two years ago when she heard about the Taylor case from Crump. Her goal was to bring attention to Taylor’s death at a time when the growing coronavirus pandemic was dominating headlines.

“We needed a movement on the ground here,” said Mallory, who relocated from New York.

On Thursday, minutes after the indictment was announced, she was speaking at a downtown park that was the launching pad for hundreds of days of protests after Taylor’s death. Protesters had renamed it “Injustice Square.”

“There were many people who tried to tell us that we were wasting our time,” Mallory said. But we knew “we still had a fallen soldier that will never come back in Breonna Taylor.”

The feds finally got around to charging the right people for the right crime.

Unfortunately that won't satisfy the community that still demands to lynch anyone and everyone involved. It also won't satisfy that portion of the media determined to stoke the fires of division that have become the norm in our once-great nation.

Like it or not, the officers on the scene acted reasonably under the circumstances (with the exception of the one officer outside who just fired randomly into the building with no visible target, and who was charged already). The problem is that those circumstances should never have occurred. The lies or "errors" on the warrant application are just a small part of the problem. The larger problem is the over use of 'No Knock' and midnight raids.