EDITORIAL
No Justice for Breonna Taylor

Jul 21, 2025

The U.S. Department of Justice just recommended a one-day sentence for Breonna Taylor’s murderer.

Taylor, a 26-year-old, black woman, was fatally shot in March 2020, when seven cops forced entry into her Louisville, Kentucky apartment after midnight. They were executing a “knock and announce” search warrant. The warrant was granted them because a friend who no longer lived there had been suspected of keeping drugs there. As the cops began pounding on her door, her companion, Kenneth Walker, fired a warning shot, after which the cops opened up a barrage of gun fire, hitting Taylor six times and killing her.

Walker and several neighbors, including one who was outside nearby, said the cops never announced themselves before bursting in. Walker fired not knowing who was breaking in. He injured no one.

Three cops were said to be involved in the shooting. A grand jury recommended charges against only one of them, Brett Hankinson. The two others, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, were not charged with any crime. Hankinson, in fact, was not charged with murdering Breonna Taylor. He was only charged with firing into the apartment of one of Taylor’s neighbors.

Just months after Breonna Taylor’s murder, Minneapolis police held down and killed George Floyd, despite his pleas of “I can’t breathe.” Floyd’s murder set off many months of demonstrations across the U.S. and around the world in what became the Black Lives Matter movement. Breonna Taylor was among those victims of police brutality whose name was called by those who took part in the protests.

That movement temporarily forced the politicians and the capitalist state apparatus to take legal action against some cops involved in killings, such as Derek Chauvin, the cop eventually convicted of killing George Floyd.

It also pushed the Biden administration to bring federal charges against some of the cops involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor in August of 2022.

Now, U.S. capitalism’s Justice Department says that the one cop convicted in Breonna Taylor’s shooting has suffered enough and proposed a one-day sentence.

Now, after all the huge demonstrations that forced politicians to actually prosecute a few killer cops, this is the Trump administration’s final response, a response intended to offend, to denigrate, and belittle those who fought for some justice. It is a deliberate “In your face!” And by ridiculing the call for justice, it opens the door to racist violence. It’s a dog whistle to Trump’s right-wing base and a green light to cops to carry out more violence.

It certainly will not be the first time the cops in this country have gotten away with murder. Just look at the cops acquitted in the deaths of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Eric Garner in New York, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, just to name a few. Cops kill more than 1,000 people every year. They kill black people at three times the rate they kill white people.

The many protesters who participated in the Black Lives Matter movement fought to reform the system. They pushed for defunding the police, for improving policing, and for more police oversight and made some gains.

But these gains are temporary, because the system isn’t broken. It was built to enforce capitalist exploitation with violence. Its more frequent use against the black population reflects how strongly capitalism is intertwined with racism in this country as it has been throughout its history.

To end police violence requires getting rid of the capitalist system itself, and the armed and violent state apparatus that works in the interests of the wealthy capitalist ruling class. To do so requires that the working class, which has its hands on the system of production, be organized to use its power to tear down this system and replace it with one of its own.