Six years after Breonna Taylor’s killing, America is weakening the rules that could have saved her | Jamil Smith

The night Breonna Taylor died started quietly.

She had spent the evening at her home in Louisville. The 26-year-old was an emergency room technician, someone who worked to prevent tragedies for others.

After midnight, police arrived at his apartment with an arrest warrant. They moved quickly, forcing the door open.

Inside, Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, didn’t yet know who had entered the house. (Police say they knocked and identified themselves; Taylor’s boyfriend, as well as several neighbors, said they did not hear him.) In the seconds that followed — confusion, shouting, a single gunshot from Walker, who thought intruders had broken in — officers returned at least 10 shots. Taylor was struck several times. She died there, in the hallway.

For a brief moment after Taylor’s death on March 13, 2020, the country seemed to understand the danger of arrest warrants and searches, the tactic that allowed police to enter Taylor’s home. His killing forced Americans to confront something many had never heard of: no-knock warrants, which allow officers to enter homes unannounced, often in the middle of the night, in the belief that warning residents might allow suspects to destroy evidence or escape.

Taylor’s death is a terrible reminder of the volatility of such encounters. A door opens. Someone inside thinks a home invasion is in progress. Someone else believes he’s executing a legal warrant. The distance between these two understandings can collapse in seconds, exploding into gunfire.

Governments across the country responded. Although no officers have been held criminally responsible for Taylor’s death, Louisville has banned no-knock warrants entirely. Kentucky, along with other states and municipalities, have also imposed limits. The Justice Department has tightened its rules governing when federal agents can seek such warrants.

The logic was simple. If the danger revealed in Breonna Taylor’s apartment was real, then the practice that created that danger required strict limits.

However, earlier this month, the Trump administration’s Justice Department quietly rescinded these federal boundaries. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche eliminated a nearly five-year-old policy limiting when no-knock warrants can be used. “We must allow our courageous law enforcement men and women to carry out their duties to the fullest extent of the law,” Blanche wrote in a Justice Department memo.

The change restores broader discretion to federal law enforcement, undoing one of the safeguards that emerged from the national reckoning of Taylor’s briefly forced death. No public accounting or explanation has been offered to anyone, much less those who took to the streets in his name. The hope, it seemed, was that no one would notice.

No-knock raids never completely disappeared. In the United States, policing remains decentralized, with thousands of local departments retaining authority to use them. Some experts have even questioned whether the federal limits adopted after Taylor’s death have made much of a difference in practice.

The Justice Department’s decision still sends a message, reinforcing the lie that restrictions intended to save lives and preserve civil rights are an obstacle to effective law enforcement. This shows us how little Breonna Taylor’s life and the lessons learned from her death matter to this administration. The risk that cost him his life is a risk they are willing to impose on the rest of us as well.

No credible justification exists for this decision. Researchers, journalists and advocacy organizations have demonstrated for years that police do not use most Swat-style raids for hostage-taking or terrorism investigations. Instead, they often terrorize residents, primarily in predominantly black communities. No-knock raids are most often used to execute drug warrants, and many produce little evidence. Of course, the raid turned up nothing, because neither Taylor nor Walker were the people the police were investigating.

What they reliably produce is volatility. The police enter homes suddenly and without warning. The residents inside have a few seconds to understand what is happening. Some think criminals are breaking in. Others use weapons to defend themselves. The officers, expecting danger, enter prepared to respond with deadly force.

The result is another police tactic that routinely creates the chaos it claims to prevent.

The death of Breonna Taylor exposed this reality with brutal clarity. The reforms that followed reflected a recognition, however fleeting, that the risks were unacceptable. What this administration’s quiet turnaround tells us is that his death has been addressed – grieved, protested, memorialized – and filed away.

This denial has consequences that go beyond any single tactic. Home occupies a special place in American law. The Fourth Amendment is based on the principle that citizens are safest there from the sudden exercise of state power. So is the long-standing expectation that agents announce themselves before entering. A no-hit raid completely destroys this protection. The state doesn’t just show up at the door. It goes through him.

American history contains earlier reminders of what it looks like when law enforcement treats a private home as a space that only suspicion allows them to invade. In 1969, Chicago police broke into the apartment of 21-year-old Fred Hampton, leader of the Black Panther Party of Illinois, while he was sleeping. They shot Hampton and his colleague Mark Clark during the raid – an episode, it was later revealed, shaped by false claims and federal surveillance of political activists.

Years ago, artist Dana Chandler recreated a bedroom door riddled with bullets during the raid that killed Hampton and Clark. Before them, as I once did, we cannot escape the simple fact that they represent: the moment when the State decides that the front door of a house is not a border but an obstacle.

Each era leaves its doors behind. The details of Hampton’s murder differ from Taylor’s, but the underlying logic is the same. The state decided that what was behind a particular door was dangerous enough to warrant removing whatever protection that door was supposed to represent.

State-sanctioned violence against black people in their own homes did not start with the no-knock warrants, and it will not end with them. However, the rules matter. They won’t always save us. But too often, their absence proves fatal.

The murder of Breonna Taylor has forced the country to examine what happens when these rules are absent or when people ignore them. The rules adopted after his death were intended to make these moments rarer. Congress even passed bipartisan legislation to ban no-knock warrants nationwide: the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act. Lawmakers have introduced it several times. They never exceeded it. This administration has now decided that such measures are an inconvenience.

What we do with this information is the question we still refuse to answer. We grieve, then we allow the conditions that made the grief necessary to quietly recover. We say his name, then we see the people in power behave as if we never did.

We know what happened in Breonna Taylor’s apartment six years ago today. We know why it happened. We know what could reduce the chances of this happening again. This administration has decided that these protections are unnecessary. This decision carries a message of its own: the death of Breonna Taylor has not changed this country enough.