Breonna Taylor was sleeping.
Minutes later, she was dead from the gunshots of police in her apartment.
A year later, no legal consequences for the cops who murdered her, or detained and jailed her boyfriend who legally tried to defend her and himself from the (now-illegal) no-knock warrant police executed in their apartment.
On the day before the anniversary of the tragedy of Taylor's killing, Kentucky's GOP Senate passed a grotesque pro-police, anti-Black, anti-free speech, victim-blaming bill, criminalizing insulting a police officer. On "The Sunday Show," Jonathan Capehart read the mind-blowing headline from the Washington Post: "Kentucky Senate votes to criminalize insulting police in way that could cause 'violent response.'"
Speechless from the brutality of this law, Capehart finally manages to ask his guest, Kimberly Atkins, "Is this a first amendment challenge?" She agreed that, of course, it was, but listed the deeper reasons the law reflected the twisted moral rot of the GOP.
"There are constitutional problems with this but I think at its core, the biggest concern, and what sort of gives me a shot in my gut and should give Americans a shot in their gut, too, it seems to be seeking to criminalize the behavior of a victim of police brutality," she explained. "It seems to shift the blame that if somebody is a victim of police brutality, not only did they ask for it, but the way they asked for it can, in addition, be criminalized. I think that's really appalling."
Appalling, but so typical of the victim-blaming abuser mentality, is it not? "You made me hurt you. If you hadn't upset me so much, I wouldn't have had to hurt you." Now, if this law passes, the police not only can legally justify harming you — as if they didn't already have wide latitude to do just that — they can charge you with a crime for their own inability to exert control over their feelings, which led to them harming you in the first place. Kentucky literally aims to criminalize speech that hurts a police officer's feelings.
But we are the snowflakes, right? The liberals. The leftists. The Democrats. The women. We are the emotional ones who cannot stand to have our feelings hurt.
Atkins continued to discuss the impossible-to-ignore timing of this bill's passage.
"I think the timing of this is horrific in that it does come near the one year anniversary of Breonna Taylor's death. Something there has still not been any accountability at all for. And we need that accountability," she rightly insisted. "Going through and listening to this trial of Derek Chauvin, recounting the anniversary of Breonna Taylor, these are reminders of the trauma that Black folks have suffered. But the trauma is compounded with the lack of justice." She explained that without justice and accountability for police who kill, "Black people feel like they don't have a chance if they are in a confrontation with police. They feel like no matter what will happen to them, there will be no accountability."
Police generally avoid all manner of accountability. The GOP knows this. So since Louisville banned no-knock warrants, the Kentucky Senate just wanted to hand the police another way to legally execute innocent Black people, right?
Breonna Taylor was sleeping.
