US Attorney General Garland
Three years after the fatal shooting of an African-American woman, Breonna Taylor, during a raid on her home, the US Department of Justice has issued a devastating testimony to the City of Louisville Police Department. Cops would use excessive force and discriminate against blacks.
Three years after the fatal shooting of an African-American woman, Breonna Taylor, during a raid on her home, the US Department of Justice has issued a devastating testimony to the City of Louisville Police Department. Police officers in the Kentucky city would use excessive force, discriminate against blacks and conduct unlawful home searches, the Washington Department of Justice said on Wednesday. Some police officers insulted blacks as “monkeys” and “animals”.
The Justice Department also alleges that security forces used unjustified strangleholds and excessive use of police dogs and tasers in its investigation into Louisville police practice. Police officers would also carry out apartment searches on the basis of invalid search warrants and, contrary to the rules, would not knock on the apartment door. The police also have an “aggressive” way of working, which they use “selectively” – “especially against blacks”.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Louisville police force violated the “constitutional rights” of the city’s citizens, thereby undermining trust in their work. According to the information, the police undertook to eliminate the abuses.
The Justice Department had launched an investigation into the Louisville Police Department more than a year after Breonna Taylor’s death. The 26-year-old paramedic was shot dead by white police officers on March 13, 2020, when plainclothes officers stormed her apartment during a night-time drug raid. Taylor’s friend, believing it was a robbery, opened fire with his gun, which he legally owned. The officers fired back, fatally hitting Taylor while her boyfriend was unharmed.
Taylor’s deaths and the deaths of George Floyd in a brutal police operation in Minneapolis in May 2020 were at the center of a wave of protests across the United States against police brutality and racism under the slogan Black Lives Matter. In the USA, deadly police violence against black people causes outrage again and again.
In January, five black police officers beat 29-year-old Tire Nichols to death during a traffic stop in the city of Memphis, Tennessee. The officers were fired and charged with second-degree murder, an intermediate stage between manslaughter and murder in Tennessee. The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced a full investigation into the Memphis Police Department.
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