Say her name: “Breonna Taylor.” She died in March in a police raid of her Louisville, Kentucky apartment due to stupid enforcement of the drug war
I’m old enough to remember the standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and the siege of Waco, Texas in 1993. Like in Louisville, people died in these 2 events (that sparked the militia movement and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing) because of police executing arrest warrants at a private home enforcing stupid gun laws.
Drugs & guns: That’s why the police state was up in the faces of David Koresh, Randy Weaver and Breonna Taylor.
How about let’s end excessive gun laws and end the war on drugs? Today, the drug war is the root source of the problem between police and Blacks. End the drug war and African American interactions with police will plummet. Home raids would drastically be reduced.
I was in Louisville for 1 week back in July. Michelle and I talked with BLM’ers in Jefferson Park. BLM is different when you’re there in person. People are really mourning the death of Ms. Taylor (and others.) I liked the regular BLM members we talked to better than the leaders.
And like the FBI at Ruby Ridge & Waco, no Louisville police were individually held accountable or prosecuted for their alleged misconduct in raiding the home of Breonna Taylor (with one minor exception). No individuals at the micro level were wrong, but at the big-picture-macro level, the whole police endeavor to begin with was wrong.
The problem in Louisville, before the problem with any individual police officers, is the drug war. Louisville PD was enforcing a lawful, judge-signed warrant (although a stale one) pursuant to current law. No knock warrants are dangerous to all involved and should be banned, but the police breaking into a private home is fraught with problems no matter what the cause, and whether they knock or not.
In Louisville, Ruby Ridge and Waco, both police and citizens claimed and used self-defense resulting in a shootout. In Louisville, Breonna Taylor got caught in the crossfire of the drug war; she was “collateral damage” in this ugly war, which isn’t on drugs, really. Rather it’s a war on people.
The moral of the story is that police breaking-into-homes must be hugely lessened as a police tactic. And to do this, the drug war would have to end.
Like the Vietnam War was wrong at the macro level and perhaps the individual soldier was good, it can be the same today with the Drug War being wrong at the macro level, but the individual police officer good. Big (and bad) government policies put well-meaning men in impossible positions prosecuting wars that can’t be won. That’s the root problem.
Remember, Breonna Taylor’s estate got a $12m settlement recently and Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge similarly garnered a civil settlement. So there can be civil justice.
Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber of 1995, was inspired to kill feds because of Ruby Ridge & Waco. He was a massive, bomb-scale protestor-looter, if you will, who didn’t like the legal results of Waco & Ruby Ridge. So he “rioted” and bombed a whole building, killing 168 people in it. He was a right-wing “domestic terrorist,” and I guess the looters, arsonists and police assaulters rioting in America’s streets today are left-wing domestic terrorists. Both have quarrels with the results of our legal system. And both are wrong in their reaction.
What’s the take away from all this? End the senseless drug war.
About the Author: Jeff E. Jared
Jeff E. Jared is a lawyer, international traveler, Libertarian and author from Kirkland WA. who has been practicing law for 25 years in criminal defense, family law and foreclosure defense.
He has run for political office three times as a Libertarian Party candidate: in 1990 and 2002 for state representative and in 2000 for U.S. Senate. From 2004 – 2007, he ran a libertarian PAC. In the early 1990’s he self-published a homemade book, a collection of his essays entitled “Suburban Anarchist.”
Jeff was born in 1963 in Bellevue, WA and went to Juanita High School (class of 1982) all in Kirkland, and then went on to Harvard (in Cambridge MA, across the Charles River from Boston) where he graduated in philosophy (class of 1988). He road tripped back and forth between Seattle and Boston perhaps 4 times from 1982 – 1988. He also did a semester abroad on Semester at Sea where he sailed around the world taking classes on a university ship during the spring of his sophomore year.
He later attended the University of California/Hastings School of Law in San Francisco (class of 1994) doing a semester abroad studying international law at Leiden University, in Leiden, Netherlands, about one hour south of Amsterdam. Leiden University was established in 1575 (61 years before Harvard was established in 1636) and is the oldest university in the Netherlands. He has lived for short times in San Diego and Huntington Beach, CA and Des Moines, IA.