In mid-March, police officers barged into Breonna Taylor’s home in Louisville, Kentucky, in the middle of the night and discharged a spray of bullets that struck and killed the 26-year-old EMT. More than two months later, leaders in her city are taking steps to make it harder for officers to enter homes without knocking.
On Monday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced that the police chief will now have to sign off on all no-knock warrants, the type of search warrant officers obtained to enter Taylor’s home as part of a drug investigation. But it’s unlikely Taylor will be the last Black woman to lose her life as a result of these warrants: Research shows that Black and Latino people have long been disproportionately affected by these kinds of raids, and tens of thousands more will likely be targeted within the year.
“They don’t do this in other neighborhoods,” Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney representing Taylor’s family, said in a press call last week. Crump has also represented the families of other Black shooting victims around the country, including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Ahmaud Arbery. “If this was another household in a more affluent community, lightning would strike and thunder would groan” if such a warrant were issued, Crump said.
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