WaPo: Opinion: Breonna Taylor’s death sparked remarkable changes to no-knock raids across America

WaPo: Opinion: Breonna Taylor’s death sparked remarkable changes to no-knock raids across America by Radley Balko:

On March 13, 2020, Louisville police officers burst into the home of Breonna Taylor, a Black 26-year-old emergency room technician. When her boyfriend Kenneth Walker woke up and fired his gun at them, police fired back, killing Taylor. Since that tragedy, something remarkable has happened: 28 states and 20 cities have passed some sort of restrictions on no-knock raids. According to the reform group Campaign Zero, another 14 states and nine cities are currently considering other legislation. Nine states have prohibited no-knocks outright, though some of those bans are more comprehensive than others.

It’s hard to overstate just how much Taylor’s death has changed the politics of this issue. No-knock raids as a policy have been around for nearly 60 years. Yet, despite the long trail of innocent bodies left in their wake, it wasn’t until last year that, for the first time in a generation, lawmakers finally began to ask if sending armed cops barging into homes in the middle of the night might not be the best way to prevent drug addiction.

The dirty secret about the no-knock raid is that it was never a tactic that emerged out of law enforcement organically. Instead, it was a policy born of politics, a wedge issue concocted to exploit middle-class fears about crime and drugs.

This entry was posted in Knock and announce. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.