{UAH} BREONNA TAYLOR GRAND JURRY SIMPLY FOLLOWED THE FACTS

Breonna Taylor grand jury simply followed the facts

by James A. Gagliano

 

 | September 24, 2020 11:40 AM

 

Once again, a grand jury has rendered a decision in a high-profile case involving police shooting a person of color, this time in Louisville, Kentucky. As if on cue, predestined violent protests and civil unrest fulminated across the country. Fires were set, and angry demonstrators continued their monthslong path of destruction, this time fueled by their frustration over the decision in the Breonna Taylor case. In what has also become too tragically commonplace, two Louisville Metro Police Department officers were shot and wounded.

Taylor, 26, a black medical worker, was tragically killed this past March in an exchange of gunfire between police and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who fired a 9 mm pistol at the entry team executing a search warrant. Walker struck police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the leg. Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove returned fire. During the exchange, Taylor was fatally struck six times by police bullets. She had been standing in the hallway, alongside Walker, who was in a shooting stance and remained unscathed during the shootout.

A Jefferson County Grand Jury ultimately charged Brett Hankinson, now a former Louisville Metro Police Department detective, with three counts of “wanton endangerment.” He fired a total of 10 rounds, with some entering an adjacent apartment that contained a male, a pregnant female, and a child. Hankinson has already been fired from the force. He now faces five years on each of the three charged counts. The other two officers were determined to have been justified in firing their weapons.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office led the investigation into the calamitous execution of the search warrant. His was a difficult position. There are concurrent federal, state, and local investigations ongoing. And he would serve as a special prosecutor, a common appointment due to concerns that local district attorney offices work too closely with the police departments they may be charged to investigate. The implications were well understood.

But Cameron is also a black man. And too often these days, everything related to our criminal justice system is defined along color lines. On MSNBC, former Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Cheryl Dorsey derisively said of Cameron: “He’s skin folk, but he is not kinfolk.” Noted race-baiter Colin Kaepernick predictably weighed in with his take that the policing profession contains “white supremacists” and needs to be abolished.

And as usual, lies proliferated in the supercharged case from the outset. Louisville’s Courier-Journal set about to fact-check some of the distortions, such as: 1) police were at the wrong apartment, 2) police effected a no-knock warrant, 3) Breonna Taylor was shot and killed while asleep in her bed, and 4) Mattingly was wounded by friendly fire. More on all this later.

Defense attorneys and social justice activists often hurl incendiary and inaccurate charges. Wildly inaccurate distortions of fact have recently led to violent riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Minneapolis. The Taylor case has certainly followed a similar false-claims playbook.

Firstly, police secured a search warrant for Taylor’s apartment. A former paramour had once resided there. And while he was arrested at a nearby drug den, Taylor’s apartment was considered a location where drugs were stashed. The court also authorized searches for three other persons if located at the apartment. And while Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was not listed on the warrant, her former boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, was named. In addition, the grand jury determined that police did conduct a “knock and announce” warrant service and clearly identified themselves. This also wasn’t an incident of fratricide, as was also falsely claimed. Walker, who fired first, was armed with a 9 mm pistol, while police were carrying weapons chambered in .40 caliber. The round that struck Mattingly was a 9 mm round.

Allow me to clear up several more misperceptions.

Having served as an FBI SWAT senior team leader in New York and as a member of its elite counterterror unit, the Hostage Rescue Team, I have planned, conducted, and led hundreds of arrest and search warrants. Not once was I the affiant on the warrant. Typically, case personnel work with prosecutors to secure warrants. Law enforcement tactical teams are then briefed on investigation details but draft the takedown plans, which they then execute. In the perfect realm, a senior agency official is then put in charge as the “on-scene commander” in order to render contemporaneous decisions.

Most of the warrants I executed were of the standard “knock and announce” variety. A select few, due to the subject’s history of violence, were “no knock.” But the distinction between the two doesn’t mean that police fail to identify themselves loudly prior to making entry. Instead, it is related to the commensurate amount of time you afford the inhabitants to open the door.

The Louisville case was not a no-knock warrant service. Walker may very well have misidentified the entry team as intruders. But once he fired his weapon at them, wounding one of the officers in the process, they had every right to defend themselves.

Cameron defended the decision of the grand jury and lamented the new era of wokeness that has pervaded our pursuit of justice:

The facts have been examined, and the grand jury, comprised of our peers and fellow residents, have made a decision. Justice is not often easy. It does not fit the mold of public opinion. And it does not conform to shifting standards. It answers only to the facts and to the law.

The social justice awakening of 2020 has its roots in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2014 justifiable fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. The federal grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer at the center of that case helped birth the Black Lives Matter movement. And while adherents purport to be fighting for justice, they demand predetermined outcomes, insistent that every police shooting of a minority must be draped in systemic racism and the officers involved convicted of murder.

That’s not how our system works. That isn’t justice and certainly strips police officers of rights to due process and the presumption of innocence. But as Cameron cautioned, the standards are shifting. And that is not only unfair to the police, but it is dangerous. What eager, selfless, idealistic, young aspirant to law enforcement hasn’t taken notice? You are considered the enemy now. Assassination attempts are occurring with shocking regularity. This serves as an ominous warning. Foolhardy "abolish the police" initiatives may soon be rendered moot.

Good luck attracting our best and brightest to the policing profession. After all, demonization has its costs.

James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John's University. Gagliano is a member of the board of directors of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.

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