One of the Cops in the Breonna Taylor Raid Wore a Body Camera
Contradictory to the report given by the Louisville Metro Police Department, one of the officers involved in the brutal Breonna Taylor raid was photographed at the crime scene wearing a body camera.
To make matters worse, not only was one officer seen wearing a body camera, but at least one more was wearing a body camera holder. This is new information, as the local police department for whom the officers were working for claimed that the men involved worked in narcotics, and thus did not wear body cameras. The department has also said in a statement to the public that there was no type of body camera footage documented of the tragic night, but with this new information, this statement may also be false.
Interviews with Breonna Taylor’s family, her boyfriend, witnesses and public officials — along with a review of jailhouse recordings, 911 calls and 1,500+ pages of police records — reveal a clearer picture of her life and her death in a botched drug raid. https://t.co/RspjlPCwms
— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 5, 2020
Taylor, an innocent 26-year-old African-American emergency medical technician, was fatally shot in her home on March 13, 2020, by officers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankinson, and Myles Cosgrove, who all work for the LMPD. According to a statement from the LMPD, the officers were executing a no-knock search warrant that night, that awoke and frightened Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Taylor was shot eight times. The LMPD wanted to search her home because they believed she had been receiving drug-filled packages from her ex-boyfriend and friend, Jamarcus Glover, who lived ten miles away. After conducting their search, no drugs were found in the apartment.
Her tragic, prejudice-driven death, along with George Floyd’s, caused an uprising in the United States and globally. People began to protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and against police brutality. Vanity Fair honored her death by memorializing her life on the cover of their September issue.
The fact that there is supposedly no footage of the raid from the night of Taylor’s death has made her case much harder to investigate. Police Chief Steve Conrad gave reporters hours after her death the following statement, “I want to start by letting you all know that we have no body-worn video cameras to share with you from this morning’s shooting. This incident was related to the execution of a search warrant by members of our Criminal Interdiction Division, and some of the officers assigned to this division do not wear body-worn video systems.”
However, photographs taken that night now contradict the statements from the LMPD, as Officer Tony James (one of the men present for the raid), wore a body cam mount. Photos of the crime scene from the night of and the morning after also suggest evidence that the scene may have been tampered with after the raid.
We must continue to fight for Taylor, as we are the only voice she has now.
