ACT

The modern police force was invented to protect property and its owners. Policing in America begins with militias taking indigenous lands. The Constitution obliged the Federal Government to suppress slave rebellions and permitted slaveholders to track down runaways anywhere in the United States.

Breonna Taylor was a casualty of the war on drugs in a system of policing designed to protect property and crush dissent.

She was one, in a long line of victims, of the Louisville Metro Police Department, L.M.P.D., whose only crime was being Black.

Now, why would a Black EMT worker with no prior arrests, or suspicion of criminal activity, become the target of a no-knock raid by the L.M.P.D.? The officers who killed Taylor work for the Place Based Investigations Unit: P.B.I.

Created in 2019, the unit concentrated on West Louisville neighborhoods that had been targeted for redevelopment. The city had just amended its public nuisance ordinance to make it easier for landlords to evict tenants and the city to seize properties.

In December 2019, a P.P..I Unit obtained a warrant to arrest Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, on drug charges at a house he rented on Elliott Avenue in West Louisville. The Police claimed, with little evidence, that he was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment on Springfield Drive, some 10 miles south of Glover’s house. It was enough to drag Taylor into the P.B.I. dragnet.

Breonna Taylor was shot dead in the middle of the night in her own home. She was unarmed. She was innocent.

On June 5th, 2020, what would have been Breonna's 27th birthday, Louisville and Jefferson County Land Bank Authority purchased the house at 2424 Elliott Avenue for $1.00.

The city and the L.M.P.D. tried to bury the incident, but Breonna's mother, Tamika Palmer, her sister, Ju’Niyah, and the activist community of Louisville would not allow it. They took to the streets in the middle of a global pandemic and forced the city to fire three of the officers involved, passed Breonna's law banning no-knock warrants, pay Taylor's family $12 million, and agree to some reforms. But this is only a start.

We need genuine abolitionist solutions. We must remake public safety by ending State-sanctioned violence, replacing police-military in prisons with humane, non-carceral paths for safety and justice.

All kinds of justice, racial justice, reproductive justice, disability justice, gender justice and justice for the Earth.

As long as we live in a world where property is valued over life and where Black lives don't matter, none of us are truly safe.

robin kelley - act

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; and Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. His essays have appeared in several anthologies and publications, including The Nation, Monthly Review, New York Times, Color Lines, American Quarterly, African Studies Review, Black Music Research Journal, Callaloo, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, Social Text, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.