Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/new-court-documents-allegedly.html
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The court documents as filed do indeed connect the two, no allegedly about it. Whether Taylor’s murder was part of a conspiracy, or whether that conspiracy in fact exists, or both, are the alleged parts.
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It sounds insane, but positioning the police to advance the interests of well connected people is… kind of exactly what they’re there for, so… not actually insane at all.
It sounds less like a conspiracy theory if you frame it the way it normally is: “Respected property owner” is upset because of “high crime” and pushes politicians, who in turn push the police department, to “clean up” the area. That “cleaning up” means concrete actions taken against specific people, i.e. people being searched and scrutinized, arrested and even killed when, under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t have been.
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I agree, this sounds quite plausible to me.
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I’m just glad we can all now focus on comforting webs of 3x5 cards and colored string, rather than the distastefully blunt narrative of “cops burst into someone’s home and executed them for no valid reason”.
I look forward to people of a certain type, all over America, discovering that they are far more concerned about Louisville politics than they are about cops killing people at random.
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This story illustrates the complete absurdity of US law enforcement. They repeatedly surveilled, swatted, arrested, and released the same low level drug dealer with no apparent goal other than the arrests and raids.
Breonna Taylor was murdered in a no-knock invasion. The evidence for the warrant was that
Detective Joshua Jaynes wrote that he had seen Glover leave Taylor’s apartment in January with a USPS package before driving to a “known drug house.”
This is obvious bullshit, and insane. A man, who the police knew well and knew where he lived and hadn’t been accused of any violent offenses, was seen somewhere 2 months earlier was somehow enough for a “legal” middle of the night swat raid. That warrant was one of 5 the same detective got the same night for the same low level drug dealers.
Jaynes sought five warrants on March 12, including one for Taylor’s apartment, a suspected drug house in the Russell neighborhood at 2424 Elliott Ave., two vacant homes nearby on Elliott Avenue and a suspected stash house on West Muhammad Ali Boulevard.
Glover and a man named Adrian Walker were named on all five search warrants and were among the night’s primary targets.
Glover, who had previously been arrested and released less than 3 months earlier after another search warrant and swat raid at the same address, was released again after the March 13 arrest and 9 days after the previous 5 warrants …
Jaynes also requested a warrant for the Elliott Avenue home on April 21, with Glover again listed as a target. Glover was arrested a second time on April 22 after the warrant was executed.
In total, there were at least 7 raid warrants issued for the same guy in less than 3 months, despite there not being accusations of any violent crimes, and the cops obviously knowing where he was all the time, and his having been released from jail days after arrest multiple times before.
Regardless of whether there was any conspiracy or the like, how could anyone read this story and not think the police are a pointless waste of money and resources who do nothing but hastle drug dealers and endanger the lives of those in poor, racialized communities?
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Hell, I could see those both being true and her murder resulting from incompetence and violent tactics rather than her being the intended target. If you have the will to eradicate any resistance to your plans, does it really matter which ones die?
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I have a feeling this is exactly the sort of thing that will fall firmly into the pile of completely true and impossible to prove. I’ve done some FOIA requests chasing shady acts related to neighborhood gentrification and the major thing you come away with is that nothing is ever explicit. Pressure to each group is done as repeated generalized requests to improve or clean up an area. The mayor or head of redevelopment never has to ask for people to be driven out. They simply have to express that an area is lovely and they could really do so much more if only crime were under control to the head of the police or comparable department. A couple of statements like that will achieve the goal.
I think we need to keep both in view, the murder in the foreground, but the system right behind it. When people talk about the violence of gentrification, this is exactly the type of scenario being referenced. I’m going to guess that the lawyers for the Taylor family aren’t trying to shift the narrative off police violence.
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Every time I think we’ve hit rock bottom it turns out to be an outcropping which we bounce off of and hit more fucking bottomNOPEoutcropping.
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If any of this could be proven it should be a massive scandal for the Vision Russell group. It seems fairly ill-conceived since the connection through Place-Based Investigations could blow it right open, especially since a person died as a result of their harassment campaign. Moreso, there is a precedent against swatting, so there is the potential for serious jailtime.
That said, this is going to be a very difficult case to prove. The complaint reads like a conspiracy theory and the burden of proof is going to be very high.
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The thing is, the “conspiracy” and the police killing random people go together. The police are sent, often at the behest of property owners, to “clean up” an area. People talk about this all the time. But the reality is, when you send your militarized police to “clean up” an area, they do so getting even sloppier than usual. All they can do is follow up on whatever leads they have, no matter how thin or tenuous, no matter how minor the matter, leads that normally wouldn’t warrant a follow-up, with more force than usual. I.e. they chase people down for minor things, make associations that aren’t warranted, and come in guns blazing, and people get hurt and killed.
That is, the police killing random people is a result of politics being enacted by a militarized murder squad - and not just in this one town, but everywhere.
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If you’re ever curious if something awful could possibly be done by the PD, I encourage you to Google “Baltimore gun trace task force” and you will quickly learn that yes, police are indeed capable of ongoing and unchecked conspiratorially-organized ludicrously horrible acts. Pretty much any and all of them.
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The wholly unnecessary force that was used in the murder of Breonna Taylor it horrifying. And is should be even more horrifying when it can be seen as one of many results of gentrification previously know as blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
a huge number of examples over time are given in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32191706-the-color-of-law
Real estate developers enlist cops to clean up a neighborhood to maximize their profits with no regard for the human beings that have dedicated their lives to living in and making real lives in these places. This is economic violence manifesting into physical violence.
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If anything framing Breonna Taylor’s murder solely as “some cops doing bad things for no reason” ignores the systemic problems in policing and the cultural/social/economic forces that create and amplify those systems.
Yes, she was murdered by racist jackbooted thugs on the government’s payroll just like countless People of Color across the country, and those cops need to be held responsible for their crimes. But we also need to acknowledge the forces that allow and even encourage racist jackbooted thugs to commit these crimes on a regular basis, both in Louisville and across America.
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I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
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They are related, but calling gentrification the same as blockbusting blurs important distinctions and the impact of each. It is possible to engage in each practice without the other. In fact, traditional blockbusting was often more lucrative as part of a cycle of downward spiraling investment, in contrast to the generally increasing investment in gentrification.
Can we please change this reality to something other than Robocop? It was a great film, but it is a terrible reality.
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They were there because somebody told them to go there. Understanding why somebody told them to go there is as important as understanding that the reason was not valid.
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It couldn’t get more over-the-top-Verhoeven-dystopia than Trump being in charge, huh? Oy fucking veh.
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