Cops Behaving Badly - Louisville, KY Edition

The death of Breonna Taylor is still in the news. And rightly so. Louisville police use excessive force, invalid warrants and discriminatory stops, DOJ review finds

The death of Breonna Taylor highlighted everything wrong with policing in the 21st Century. Starting with no-knock warrants, moving through questionable evidence for search warrants in the name of The War on (Some) Drugs™ and ending with "qualified immunity." Oh, and with a side-order of "shoot first, and second, and third, and ask questions never.

Cops break into a home, unannounced, in the middle of the night. Someone in the home thinks a home invasion has begun (what else would you think?) and fires in self-defense. Police respond en masse, killing someone.

Then the reports the cops filed contains errors, some of them do, anyway. The work leading up to the issuance of the search warrant contains errors, or lies. Because of Qualified Immunity (which should be called unqualified or unlimited immunity) no one is charged. Well, in this case one of the cops was charged with "wanton endangerment" for firing blind, and sending bullets into a neighboring apartment. (See this article, from The BBC, if you need a refresher on what happened.)

The Louisville Metro Police Department and the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro government engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional behavior by routinely using excessive force, conducting searches based on invalid warrants and unlawfully discriminating against Black people in enforcement activities, a wide-ranging federal investigation found.

The review, conducted by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, also found that police violate the rights of those "engaged in protected speech critical of policing" and that some officers used racial slurs about Black citizens. The city has reached an agreement in principle to resolve the constitutional violations found by federal investigators, the Justice Department said.

Now I'm not usually a fan of the DoJ. They're a federal bureaucracy that I wouldn't count on to come in out of the rain during a thunderstorm, but I think in this case, a lot of what they have to say is probably justified. I'm from Chicago, after all, and Chicago PD has been screwed up, and sometimes corrupt, for as long as I've been alive, and probably much longer. Stretching my mind to accept that the LMPD is at least as screwed up as Chicago PD is not much of a stretch.