What the sentence in Breonna Taylor’s death says about police reform under Trump
A federal judge sentenced a former Louisville police officer Kentucky to 33 months in prison, with three years of supervised liberation, for his role in a sloppy raid who accidentally killed Breonna Taylor five years ago.
The sentence of Brett Hankison, who intervened after the United States Ministry of Justice suggested a punishment of a day in prison, closes the book on a case which helped to arouse calls at the national level to racial justice and the police reform. But that leaves persistent concerns concerning the difficulties of carrying charges against individual officers in cases of excessive force, as well as on the politically polarized way of the debate on the reform of the police in America.
“There was no prosecution for us; there was no prosecution there for Breonna,” said Tamika Palmer, Ms. Taylor’s mother after the hearing. “We could have left without anything for what they recommended. [But] We are still there and I am grateful that something has happened. »»
Why we wrote this
A police officer involved in the raid who killed Breonna Taylor in 2020 was sentenced today. The approach of the Ministry of Justice in the case indicates a retirement of police reform efforts.
In 2020, a tactical police unit killed Ms. Taylor, a black emergency technician, while performing a “smaller mandate” on her apartment. Mr. Hankison, who is white, is the only officer involved in the raid to have been found guilty of a crime. After the Biden Ministry of Justice managed to continue Mr. Hankison for abusing civil rights, the management of the Doj under President Donald Trump made a spectacular facet last week, recommending to judge Rebecca Grady Jennings a sentence of a day in prison. The Biden administration had recommended a sentence from 11 to 14 years old.
The recommendation for determining the penalty occurred in the midst of an effort of several months of the Trump administration to reverse the policies established under the former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden to respond to the national concerns that the American police had become too fast to use violence, especially when it deals with black suspects. The death of Ms. Taylor – as well as the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis – helped to feed the national demonstrations against police brutality in 2020. They followed demonstrations earlier after the death of the police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, both in 2014.
But these demonstrations, the peaks of crime in the cities where the police were widely criticized, and the large number of Americans killed by the police each year provided voters which sometimes seems to be a binary choice: to demand responsibility and invite anarchy, or defend the police and release excess. People involved in police reform say that lasting solutions require both systemic improvements and individual responsibility when things go wrong.
“It is regrettable that the police responsibility be linked to partisan projects,” said Ian Adams, a former Utah police officer who is now a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.
“I do not know that the social sloganel is how we should approach on each side of the police responsibility,” he adds. “Neither” Back the Blue “nor” Say Her Name “captures the importance of what we are doing here.”
A push for the reform – and a subject
Ten years ago, President Obama began the thrust of modern American police reform. He trained a working group on the 21st century police. Its administration urged police services to adopt body cameras and considerably increased the number of federal consent decrees aimed at reforming specific departments.
The Biden administration has increased these policies, in part in response to public pressure after the death of Mr. Floyd and Ms. Taylor. The Ministry of Justice has brought federal accusations in both cases. By announcing the condemnation of Mr. Hankison, Kristen Clarke – then the deputy prosecutor general of civil rights – encouraged people to “say his name”, echoing a slogan that the demonstrators used after the death of Ms. Taylor.
Source: Epidemiology project for the University of Chicago University
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Karen Norris / Staff
President Trump campaigned on a promise to take a very different approach on police issues, and this promise was held in the case of Hankison and beyond. He said that “a real brutal and nasty day” would end the end of retail, and he described the police eliminating campus demonstrators at Columbia University as “a good thing to watch”. In a decree in April, he called on his administration to “release local police forces with a high impact”, as well as “protect and defend agents from the order forced” from crimes.
One of his first power in power was to forgive two Washington, DC police officers, convicted of their role in a deadly police pursuit.
In the case of Mr. Hankison, the jury’s verdict last year left him in front of a maximum sentence of life for life. Career prosecutors who try business generally submit recommendations for condemnation to judges, but in this case, the recommendation came from their boss, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant prosecutor of civil rights.
In a legal file last week, Ms. Dhillon argued that after three trials – of which only ended with a conviction – as well as the five -year psychological stress as a criminal defendant, more time behind bars would be useless and unjust.
The condemnation “will almost certainly ensure that the Hankison defendant is no longer used as a law enforcement and will also ensure that he never legally has a firearm again,” she wrote.
“Addition of these consequences [lengthy] The sentence …, in the opinion of the government, would be simply unfair in these circumstances, “she added.
Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / AP
After the hearing, members of the family of Ms. Taylor and their lawyers expressed both a reparation against the verdict and the consternation of the way in which the Ministry of Justice had dealt with the last stage of the case. Ben Crump, one of the family lawyers, described it as “as a story by George Orwell”.
“Never in my career as a lawyer, I have heard that a prosecutor clashes so categorically for a condemned criminal,” he added.
The arguments involve a traditional debate among lawyers for conviction. Should a sentence send a message to the specific individual condemned? Or should he send a message to the company more broadly?
“You might say that it is a man who, apart from his police work, did not constitute a threat of evil to the public, so why should he be in prison?” Said Rachel Moran, police liability expert at the School of Law from St. Thomas University.
“But as a symbolic question, the doj is well aware that they also say implicitly:” We do not want to make an example of this officer and, in fact, we do the opposite “by asking for a sentence of a day,” she adds.
What climate now in local communities?
But decisions like that of the Taylor affair suggest that changes in federal perspectives may have a significant impact on local communities. There is a federal tap of the money for the police which can be redirected or suffocated under the direction of the administration. And even in liberal states, there is a feeling more and more that the police should have the freedom to do their job as long as there are solid measures of responsibility in place.
An emphasis is now put on what could become some of these responsibility measures in the Trump administration.
One of these measures is a consent decree, a legal contract agreed between a police service, its local government and the Ministry of Justice after the agency found evidence of violations of civil rights. Project 2025, a conservative plan for this Trump administration, called in the end of consent decrees, describing them as “cheeky partisan and ideologically conducted”. The Trump administration has since ended all the consent decrees in which the Ministry of Justice was initiated, notably one with the Louisville police service and one with the Minneapolis police service.
Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Division of the DoJ, the section responsible for the management of proceedings against police offenses, faced an exodus of staff.
Since January, more than 250 lawyers in the division – around 70% of its staff – have left or plan to go, according to reports. The appointments who had encouraged lawyers for civil rights to take again, have recently started asking the career officials to return, the Guardian reported last month. The six lawyers of DoJ supervising a consent decree with the New Orleans police service, for example, are among those who left the agency.
In the end, according to experts, the successful police reform must marry individual responsibility with systemic improvements.
“If you continue only one track, the others weakens. Systemic reforms without credible individual sanctions reproduce cynicism, while reduction agents without structural reform guarantee a rotating door of future cases, “explains Thaddeus Johnson, former police officer and now the main member of the Criminal Justice Council.
“The cropping of the police reform as a project to modernize public services, similar to the revisions of aeronautical security, helps to mitigate the partisan reflexes.”
