What Does Justice for Breonna Taylor Look Like?
In a piece for Essence, prison industrial complex abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie challenge us to consider whether arresting and prosecuting the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor (or George Floyd or Elijah McClain) will result in justice.
Beyond strategic assessments of what is most likely to bring justice, ultimately, we must choose to support collective responses that align with our values. Demands for arrests and prosecutions of killer cops are inconsistent with demands to #DefundPolice because they have proven to be sources of violence not safety. We can’t claim the system must be dismantled because it is a danger to Black lives and at the same time legitimize it by turning to it for justice. As Angela Y. Davis points out, “we have to be consistent” in our analysis, and not respond to violence in a way that compounds it. We need to use our radical imaginations to come up with new structures of accountability beyond the system we are working to dismantle.
Noting that “turning away from systems of policing and punishment doesn’t mean turning away from accountability”, Kaba and Ritchie argue that use of a reparations framework would be more effective in delivering justice to Taylor’s family and in preventing future killings and violence by police.
Under a reparations framework Breonna’s family — and all of us — are also entitled to more than an individualized response to what is a systemic problem. We are entitled to immediate cessation of the actions that caused her death — no knock warrants, to be sure, but also short knock warrants, and dangerous drug raids in all their forms. And all of us are entitled to non-repetition, an end to the conditions that produced her death, including an end to the drug war that killed her, and the forces of gentrification that brought police into her neighborhood. It is long past time for an approach to drug use that saves lives instead of ending them — whether in a raid or in a cell — and a reckoning with the ways in which economic policies are driving deadly policing practices.
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