‘Back the Blue’ Is Anything But

If you’re reading this, you probably know who Breonna Taylor was. Briefly, she was a young woman who was killed by police in a horrifically botched attempt to serve a warrant related to a non-violent drug offense. No officer was charged for her death.

Breonna Taylor is yet another victim of a toxic police system that poses a very real threat to civilians in this country. But something else happened the night she was killed that showcases another threat — this one to police officers.

Kenneth Walker was Taylor’s boyfriend and was there when the police broke down the door. Walker fired a gun, striking an officer in the leg. Officers returned fire, killing Taylor. Kenneth Walker was charged with attempted murder, but these charges were later dropped. Prosecutors couldn’t determine whether or not Walker knew that police were coming through the door. If he didn’t know, then it was reasonable for him to have feared for his life, and fired to protect himself and Taylor.

This sequence of events is absurdly tragic. The police break down the door, Walker believes it is a home invasion and is therefore justified in using deadly force against the intruders, and the officers are then justified in returning their own deadly force. In other words, this was a legal shootout between a civilian and the police.

Let me repeat that. This was a legal shootout between a civilian and the police.

The fact that such an event could take place is mind-boggling. The police created a situation in which a member of the public was legally justified in shooting at them. This is not a sign of a healthy public safety system.

I think about this a lot when I hear people claim that they “back the blue” and reject any ideas about defunding. Defending the police in this situation means that they are defending a system that unnecessarily puts police officer lives at risk. They are cheering for a system that is deadly to cops.

I’ve written about these topics before (here, here, and here), but modern policing is a terrible system for the people who work inside of it. Cops are asked to do too much, and suffer from vastly more stress-related disorders than the general public. Cops aren’t trained properly to handle protests, and their antagonistic approach creates more dangerous situations for themselves. Black officers are routinely subjected to racist treatment at the hands of other officers.

Anyone who claims to care about cops should be calling for significant changes to the policing model. The fact that they don’t means one of two things.

First option: They don’t really understand how policing works. They don’t understand how the system puts officers at heightened risk for no reason related to public safety.

Second option: They understand just fine, but they don’t care. They accept the risk to police officers, because they’re not actually concerned with public safety — either for officers or the general public. They’re concerned with keeping the current model of policing that enforces and maintains social hierarchies.

I can very easily forgive the first option. The media (across the board — news and entertainment) has done an abysmal job of educating people about police and crime. In fact, they have done a tremendous job of misinforming people. It’s not just that people don’t understand the police; it’s that they think they understand, because they’ve been fed a pack of lies.

The second option is the scary one. It means that an agreement can’t be found, because we’re not striving for the same goal. I believe the goal of police should be to maintain public safety. If someone else doesn’t believe that, then we can’t really have a fruitful discussion on changing the policing model.

Breonna Taylor was legally killed by the police.* Officer Jonathan Mattingly was legally shot by Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend. That these two statements are true are a clear indication that something is terribly wrong. Citizens and officers are at risk of deadly harm.

We cannot have a functioning society in which citizens and police can have legal gun battles with each other. We can’t have a public safety system that deprioritizes public safety. We can’t have a policing model that sacrifices officers.

If people really want to “back the blue”, they should support defunding the police. They should support massive structural changes that will make officers’ jobs safer and easier. Or maybe they don’t really support officers as much as they claim to.

*I mean that the justice system determined that it was legal. I believe a healthy justice system would have found the killing to be murder.

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This post was previously published on Equality Includes You.

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