Ross: Breonna Taylor decision is about more than racial bias
Sep 24, 2020, 7:51 AM | Updated: 10:59 am
(AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
The Breonna Taylor shooting may be a prime example of racial bias, but there’s another issue here, too.
The reason the grand jury decided not to charge the officer who killed Breonna in her apartment is because when that door came off its hinges and those strangers burst in, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who was legally armed, fired first.
Defending your home with a gun is legal in Kentucky, and many other states – it’s one of the main reasons people buy guns!
But the police saw that as attempted murder of a police officer, and suddenly the fact that there was no drug dealing going on didn’t matter. One officer fired indiscriminately into a neighboring apartment – he was indicted. But the officer who fired back at the boyfriend and hit Breonna instead was not, because, like the boyfriend who was also not charged, he was defending himself!
Each side was doing what the law allows, and that’s the problem: what the law allows.
The problem with making this just about race is that people may be tempted to think, “well if I’m not black, I’m safe.”
But given that there are tens of thousands of these raids each year, the message I get is that as long the law allows plainclothes police to break down doors in the middle of the night to look for drugs, nobody’s safe.
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