Breonna Taylor settlement in Louisville. We just heard Benjamin Crump, as well as Breonna’s mother and Tamika Mallory, talking about this record $12 million settlement to the family, and police reform in Louisville, though the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor have not been arrested.
Mychal Denzel Smith talking:
I hope that this settlement brings Breonna Taylor’s family some semblance of peace. I hope that this helps in mitigating their pain, in helping them heal together. But I think we have to dispense with the notion that there is justice for Breonna Taylor at this point. There is no justice in her lost life. There is no justice in arresting and indicting and convicting the officers who killed her, because what we’re doing then is relying on a system that is built to inscribe injustice in our society to deliver justice, that the idea that prison would be a just result. No, what the system can do right now is enact a sense of revenge by inflicting harm on the officers who killed Breonna Taylor.
And, look, her family is well within their rights to want that right now, and I will never question that. But what I can say, or what I want the rest of us to think through, is the idea that what the community needs in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor, what the nation needs in the response to killing of Breonna Taylor, is the arrest of these individual officers. The only way to prevent another instance of the killing that — the situation that took Breonna Taylor’s life is to defund, dismantle police departments across the nation, across the world, abolishing police, abolishing the very idea of policing, setting up a new organizing principle for our society that wouldn’t require policing in the first place.
You know, what we’re looking at there — I mean, the settlement is huge, but the idea of public money subsidizing Black death is nothing new. This is routine. And they’re willing to pay this amount of money in order to continue the system. You know, police are going to kill again over a thousand people every year, and they’d be willing to pay $12 million for each of those if that means that they can go about their business continuing to do that.
What I think we have to understand is that it’s a structural problem. And some of these reforms that they’ve offered here in response, I mean, it’s great that they’re thinking in that way, that in addition to the monetary settlement, they’re asking for things to change within the police department. But the things that they’ve asked for, I mean, the things — or, the things that they’ve won here in terms of police officers needing to be parts of their community and live in the communities that they’re policing, well, that just means that police are going to kill their neighbors now. The idea that we need more oversight from higher-ups within the police departments, what do we think is going to happen? Do we think that police chiefs have more compassion, that police chiefs have more wisdom to pass down or more ideas around eliminating violence from their communities? This isn’t — these aren’t things that are going to change the fundamental nature of policing or eliminate the reasons for policing in the first place.
So, I think we just have to understand that there is no — there’s no justice here. Justice needs to be conceptualized as something that is more proactive, that is about providing people with the things that they need for a sustainable life while they’re here, and that we can’t think that justice means monetary compensation for Black death.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mychal Denzel Smith, I wanted to ask you — Benjamin Crump, at the press conference yesterday, put a lot of stress on this whole issue of reforms of the so-called no-knock warrants. These were actually products of the 1980s Reagan “war on drugs.” In the early 1980s, there were about 1,500 no-knock warrants by law enforcement across the country. Today there are 60,000 to 70,000 a year. Do you think that this will have any significant impact, this whole idea that there are no constitutional rights for people who are accused of or are suspected of any kind of illegal activity, that police can just break down their door?
MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Yeah. I mean, James Baldwin was writing about no-knock warrants in the ’60s, and Gil Scott-Heron, again in the ’70s, talking about these no-knock warrants, the ability of police to simply go into any home that they please, without cause, break down doors and arrest people, shoot people.
I mean, but the idea that the warrant, in and of itself, being something that we require in these instances points to the fact that people have no rights to begin with, right? Because even if you require the warrant, police find ways around that or develop systems that then don’t require them to have warrants in the first place. There’s no warrant required or had — there was no warrant required for stop-and-frisk here in New York City, right? But we found justifications — or, the city found justifications for being able to implement that program.
So, again, I think, you know, there’s the specifics, right? There’s the things that very clearly are harmful, and no-knock warrants are something that we absolutely have to address here, but that’s part of a structural problem in which what police are sent out to do in these instances is to enforce these laws that are meant to subjugate segments of the population.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of the role that the protest movement across the country has had, and the activists in Kentucky specifically, in terms of forcing — we’re increasingly seeing police departments in cities have to respond — the Rochester situation where the mayor fires the police chief this week. What is your assessment of the impact of the movement on trying to get some structural changes?
MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: There won’t be any structural changes without movement. And I think we have to acknowledge that a huge reason why these changes are taking place in the first place is that it’s not just that people are in the streets, it’s not just that people are demanding these things, it’s that they’ve taken radical action. They have taken militant action. They’ve directly confronted state power.
If nothing happens — the protest movement doesn’t grow to the size that it did even this past summer, if it weren’t for the fact that, in the beginning of this, that police station was burned in Minneapolis — right? — that police cars were set on fire in New York, in Atlanta, in Louisville. We have to understand that the property destruction as a tactic was used, and it set the nation on notice that something has to change now.
And so, the thing that I — you know, that gives me hope is that these things are possible. But what makes me question — what I have questions around is: How much more of that is going to be necessary, if what we’ve won in the aftermath of that, of such dramatic action, is these very milquetoast and middle-of-the-road reforms?
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Mychal Denzel Smith
author and fellow at Type Media Center.
— source democracynow.org | Sep 16, 2020