58. WHAT DOES JUSTICE FOR BREONNA TAYLOR ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE? - When Both Black Lives And Abolition Matters

Like many people last week, I was troubled by the decision not to charge the police officers involved in the murder of Breonna Taylor for her killing. Yet another black life taken by a militarised police force without any legal consequence for the perpetrators, protected by their role as state enforcers.

For those who don’t know the details, Breonna Taylor was a nurse shot in her home by police entering with a “no-knock warrant” to look for drugs they believed were being sold from her apartment after she came home from a shift treating Covid-19 patients. On the night of her murder, the police knocked but did not announce who they were. Scared by the noise at the late hour, Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, picked up his gun (which he was licensed to use) and when the police entered the house, not knowing it was the police, he fired on the trespassers invading his home. Their response was to shoot back. Twenty-two shots were fired by police and Breonna, sleeping in the next room, was shot eight times.

I am not interested here in analysing the case further. Let us assume the key facts are clear: Taylor, an innocent black woman, was shot eight times and killed in her own home by the police while she was sleeping. Even if the apartment was the apartment from which drugs were being sold and Taylor was involved, and not innocent, such a “crime” (remember - those supermarkets selling us coffee and alcohol are also selling drugs) did not warrant a death sentence (if any crime could be said to warrant one - again, another matter for another day). And yes, Walker could be said to “fire first”, but this just reminds us that “no-knock warrants” and police smashing down doors without explaining what is happening are a foolish approach to tackling crime in a country where many citizens are licensed gun owners told they have a right to defend their property. Likewise, it reminds us that a police force working in such a country should be better trained at deescalating rather than escalating potential conflict. Walker should never have felt the need to shoot his gun in his own home, and once it was shot, a police force truly interested in protecting and serving would be able to disarm and deescalate someone shooting their gun without resort to firing indiscriminately into a private residence. My argument starts with the assumption of unequivocal guilt of the police officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s death and the perspective that on that night, on March 13th, an innocent woman was murdered by the police.

However, it is with what comes next that we have a problem.

Like many these last few months I have heard the dual cries of “black lives matter” and “defund the police”. I have read, listened and learned for years about the ongoing legacy of violence from the state towards people of colour, not only in America, where the death of George Floyd propelled the issue of police violence back into the mainstream consciousness, but here in the UK too. As a anarchist, and longtime believer in both police and prison abolition, I have been heartened not only by the growing commitment to black lives these recent protests have spawned, but the public, and international, conversations they have also encouraged around the transformation of how we deal with crime and punishment. In those three words - defund the police - we see the start of an important conversation:

- What does it mean to defund the police?

- It means taking away the police’s responsibility to deal with social issues they have no business dealing with and transforming our approach to how we deal with various problems in society from an approach of punishment and penalty to one of compassion and care. It means investing less in policing and more in alternative approaches to keeping us safe.

- Why shouldn’t the police be used?

And from that question we begin by showing the ways in which force and threat make so many problems worse instead of better, the numerous failings of policing to solve or minimise the problems they are charged to answer, and the distinct failure of prison as a meaningful response to crime.

Once we agree to the principles of defunding the police, it is only a few logical steps away from recognising that we must abolish prisons, and maybe the police entirely.

- So where are the areas where we do need police, and where sending people to prison actually works?

- ………?

Hence the problem with what comes next when we shout that we want “justice for Breonna Taylor”.

Because we do want justice. Breonna deserves justice. She should not be dead right now and the police killed her. But if I advocate the imprisonment of the police that killed her I am not advocating justice. I am advocating more barbarism. I am advocating the continuation of the prison industrial complex. I am advocating justice only when it suits me and injustice where it doesn't.

My commitment to prison abolition means that even the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor should not go to prison for their actions. That even in cases like this we need to see incarceration is no solution. That true justice for Breonna Taylor would mean transforming society so that the sort of policing which led to her murder no longer takes place. The logic of such policing stems from the false notion that crime is something which must be treated with zero tolerance and criminals seen as inherently bad people who need to be locked up - or taken out - for our protection, justifying the overwhelming use of force, and continuing use of arcane punishments, in the name of public safety and so-called retributive “justice”.

When we call for her killers to be sent to prison for what they did, we do not call for justice. We call for the cycle to continue.

I am disappointed that Breonna Taylor’s killers have not yet faced justice for what they did, but I am glad that there remain three fewer people in prison today than there could be if they had been locked away. Justice for Breonna Taylor does not mean putting three more human beings through the inhuman punishment of prison, it means making sure no other innocent person is shot to death in their own home by a rampaging and weaponised arm of the state. It means restoring the rights and the humanity to those currently incarcerated by abolishing prisons and finding better ways of dealing with not only crime, but with the causes of those crimes. It means finding alternatives to policing so that nobody ever has to be woken in the middle of the night by a battering ram through their door again.

Policing doesn’t work. Prisons don’t work. If black lives matter and we are to have true justice for all those black lives so carelessly stolen by unchecked police brutality, we must abolish police and prisons now and end the structures which perpetuate the systemic devaluing of so many black lives. Even for those, such as the killers of Breonna Taylor, whom our baser, self-destructive, instincts would like to see locked away for a very long time.

Author: DaN McKee

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