Part III: How Breonna Taylor became another victim to the weakening of the Fourth Amendment
This is Part III of my series titled “We Must Still Fight For Breonna Taylor.” On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed by three officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department. The officers were executing a no-knock warrant as part of a drug investigation. This five-part series is intended to shed light on several systemic issues that led to her tragedy. It’s more than just arresting the cops, although this series will also discuss law enforcement accountability. We must still fight for Breonna Taylor, the countless others who came before her and nationwide reform to the systemic issues that fuel these tragedies.
Part I: We must still fight for Breonna Taylor and other Black women
Part II: When innocent people think burglary during a midnight drug raid
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The first two parts of this series detailed a lack of accountability in law enforcement after botched drug raids. It’s extremely vital, however, to understand that responsibility goes well beyond any trigger-happy officers.
The next three parts of this series will cover the systemic areas of culpability.
Dr. Peter Kraska, a professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, spoke with me to help illuminate these measures. In May, the Louisville Metro City Council reached out to Kraska as they put together local legislation following the death of Breonna Taylor. The attorneys working her case, Benjamin Crump and Sam Aguiar, also asked Kraska to help out as an expert witness.
The reason Kraska was coveted is because he has studied the type of raids that led to Breonna’s death for nearly three decades, surveying police departments all across the country. In the early 1990s, Kraska began a two-year ethnography that allowed him to work closely with regional and local SWAT teams that were doing no-knock drug raids on Black homes.
“What I couldn’t help notice during that two-year period,” Kraska says, “was that there was this really underground silent movement going on to invoke the growth of SWAT teams in their numbers, but more importantly, in the kinds of activities they were engaged in.”
Those activities were hazardous to the Black community and are still occurring in 2020.
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In most cases, no-knock raids are carried out by SWAT or drug tactical teams. The officers who killed Breonna wore plainclothes, but the tactics were identical to those used by SWAT (policemen dressed as soldiers). For example, in the middle of the night, which is when most SWAT deployments are made for drugs, three armed police officers broke into Breonna’s apartment with a battering ram. That’s the standard device SWAT teams use.
Kraska sees no difference either.
“Sometimes they’re in some paramilitary gear, and then sometimes they’re in plain clothes,” he said. “Here’s the thing, if the tactics are exactly the same, and the weaponry is the same, what does it matter what they’re wearing? It’s a militant-style raid, and of course that’s what happened that tragic evening with Kenneth Walker and Breonna Taylor. Same tactics.”
When SWAT units were created in the late 1960s, their deployments were typically and appropriately in response to emergencies. Think active-shooter scenarios and hostage situations. Never were deployments made to search people’s homes for contraband.
That changed in the 1980s. In an effort to augment the War on Drugs, the Reagan administration sought a militaristic approach in combating the supply of narcotics.
He elevated the use of no-knock and quick-knock warrants.
Kraska estimates that SWAT raids have grown from 3,000 a year in the 1980s to at least 60,000 annually in recent years. The vast majority of that spike has been drug policing.
In 2014, the ACLU studied over 800 SWAT deployments by law enforcement agencies. Researchers found that hostage situations and active-shooter scenarios are still not the primary “battle” for militarized police, even though that’s why they were implemented. More than 60% of the deployments studied were for drug searches, and 61% of the people impacted in those searches were minorities. Contraband was found in only 35% of the deployments, meaning that many innocent people had their homes pointlessly raided — just like Breonna.
Breonna was born in 1993.
The War on Drugs has outlived her.
“There’s been no update of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs,” Kraska said. “We’re still fully in the midst of that same War on Drugs that has been unequivocally prosecuted against the Black community. It’s of course not only prosecuted against Blacks. It’s just significantly disproportionate.”
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Ava Duvernay’s documentary titled “The 13th” on Netflix describes how the drug war has fueled mass incarceration, forcing African Americans to do free labor behind bars and ultimately put more dollars in the pockets of companies and shareholders.
The title of the documentary is in reference to the 13th Amendment, which abolishes slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” But as the exploitation of the 13th Amendment began to rise, the Fourth Amendment (which protects the right to privacy in one’s home against unreasonable searches and seizures) began to weaken.
A series of Supreme Court decisions have given police increased authority to barge into people’s homes for drug investigations. It’s the reason a detective was able to easily acquire a no-knock warrant on Breonna’s apartment.
Radley Balko of The Washington Post describes how the no-knock warrant for Breonna’s home was illegal, saying measures were either falsified or bypassed to obtain the forced entry. That’s extremely typical in paramilitary raids. The incident report after the shooting was also fabricated. It claimed Breonna had no injuries and was a victim of a crime.
The detective who applied for the warrant is on administrative reassignment. He was not one of the three officers who opened fire on Breonna, but he’s ultimately just as culpable.
Likewise for the Louisville judge who signed off on a bunch of poorly-written warrants in just over 10 minutes. She moved at practically the same pace as LeBron James signing a bunch of basketballs for kids, except her signature was stamped on a death warrant.
This wouldn’t be the first time a judge in the city signed off on an illegal search warrant, but the Louisville Metro City Council is hoping it will be the last.
No-knock warrants have been banned in Louisville following a unanimous vote of the city council. The new ordinance is known as “Breonna’s Law.” It bans any search warrant that does not require police to announce themselves. If there’s an imminent threat inside a home (such as a hostage situation), no warrant is needed for entry.
“What Louisville did, they have just eliminated doing investigatory search warrant raids on people’s private residences for drugs,” Kraska said. “That sounds simplistic, but if you think about it, by eliminating the police’s ability to raid people’s homes for drug offenses, you’re eliminating the whole problem.”
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The “Justice in Policing Act” bill was introduced as a measure that would ban no-knock warrants in drug cases at the federal level. It was passed by the US House of Representatives, but not the Senate.
The federal measure appears dim in the eyes of many.
“Things are just too polarized,” Kraska said. “But I think at the local level there’s a lot stronger of a possibility [to ban no-knock warrants].”
Oregon and Florida are the only states that disallow no-knock warrants. Until more states and cities follow suit, many innocent citizens are at risk of being dismissed as just another by-product of the War on Drugs.
Police officers are in peril, too. When you consider that nearly half of American households have guns, it’s unsurprising and unfortunate that police have suffered deaths in these types of raids. A 2017 report from The New York Times found that, between 2010 and 2016 alone, 13 law enforcement officers died in such drug raids. More than six times as many civilians (81) were killed, with many more injured or wounded.
“It doesn’t even make any sense for the police themselves,” Kraska said. “The gain that they’re getting versus the risk they’re taking with their own lives just doesn’t make any sense. It certainly can’t be for the outcome, because the outcomes are dismal.”
There are police on the streets complicit to the culture of paramilitary drug raids, but it’s also the lousy and disingenuous work done by their colleagues that continue to create these perilous situations.
It’s the judges, politicians, prosecutors and police officials who have let these raids become so common over the past 30 years. It’s the policies in place that further Reagan’s militarized agenda. It’s the dangerous no-knock and quick-knock warrants used to carry out the War on Drugs.
“When we talk about a no-knock raid, that’s the end result of a long series of events,” Kraska said. “That’s one of the big things that was going on in Louisville. That’s one of the big things going on all over the country.”
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Part IV: How culture has become a roadblock to reform in drug raids
Part V: How money fuels the type of raids that killed Breonna Taylor
