Breonna Taylor decision: two officers shot in Louisville as protests erupt across US – as it happened

Live coverage continues here:

I’m going to be closing this blog shortly, but I’ll be bringing you more coverage of the reaction to the Breonna Taylor charging decision over on our US politics live blog for Thursday. In the meantime, here’s a summary of where we are at:

• The Jefferson county grand jury has indicted one of the officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor. Former Louisville police officer Brett Hankinson faces three felony counts of first-degree wanton endangerment. None of the other officers involved in the fatal shooting were indicted. No homicide charges were issued.
• Thousands of people joined protests in many major US city which saw protesters chanting “Say her name! Breonna Taylor” and “No justice, no peace”. Posters and shrines dedicated to Taylor were seen all around as protesters marched.
• Two police officers in Louisville were shot and suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Louisville police have one suspect in custody.
• A car drove through protests in Denver, there were no injuries. Chemical agents were used on protesters by the authorities in Atlanta and other cities. A riot was declare in Portland, Oregon, where police shared a video which appeared to show them being attacked with a Molotov cocktail.
• Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family of Breonna Taylor, described the grand jury announcement as “outrageous and offensive.” Crump noted that none of the charges announced today appear to relate directly to the fatal shooting of Taylor. “If Brett Hankison’s behavior was wanton endangerment to people in neighboring apartments, then it should have been wanton endangerment in Breonna Taylor’s apartment too. In fact, it should have been ruled wanton murder,” Crump said in a tweet.
• Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, learned of the charging decision minutes before attorney general’s announcement. The family’s attorney, Sam Aguiar, told CNN: “She had to drive all the way down there to be told this, despite two advanced requests from me to not force her to drive down only to learn no indictments.”

You can continue to follow the latest developments over here…

Another New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, sums up the feelings of a lot of people this morning…

Dr Melanye Price has written about Breonna Taylor for the New York Times this morning. In a piece headlined “It hurts to keep hoping for justice”, Price picks up on Kentucky’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron using the phrase “Mob justice is not justice”. She writes:

All Ms. Taylor’s family wanted, and all many of the protesters wanted, is for the Constitution and the mechanism of justice to work for them the way it works for others. Mr. Cameron, who is Black, should know that to suggest that protesters are nothing but a mob dehumanizes the people calling for justice and respect. And it reminds African-Americans of the way we’re so often unfairly portrayed as perpetrators of crime, and so rarely seen as victims.

Police officers who kill citizens are rarely convicted. But in this tragic situation, in which the woman killed was not only unarmed but asleep in the moments before a police officer took her life, we hoped that for once, justice would be on our side. This is yet another disappointing reminder that it’s not.

These efforts take a cumulative toll. Young African-Americans consuming a regular diet of Black death are learning to not trust their government. It’s painful to realize that kneeling for the national anthem can cost a football player like Colin Kaepernick his career, but a police officer firing a deadly shot into an innocent young woman’s home late at night will face no consequences. Black people will try to make sense of this, try to rebuild whatever expectation of safety we can muster, and tap into coping mechanisms that are now so familiar. Preparing for moments like this feels like a futile job that can never really soften the actual experience.

Read it here: New York Times – Melanye Price: It hurts to keep hoping for justice

Also with the election in mind, here is some social media news. Facebook’s long-delayed independent oversight board plans to launch in mid-to-late October, just before the presidential election, although a board member said he did not know whether it would hear cases related to the contest

The board, announced by Facebook in response to criticism of its handling of problematic content, will initially have the power to review decisions to take down posts from Facebook and Instagram, and recommend policy changes.

Elizabeth Culliford reports for Reuters that some experts have said it will not be able to help combat misinformation, because it will have no authority at first to evaluate posts that the company decides to leave up.

Oversight board member – and former Guardian editor – Alan Rusbridger told Reuters in an interview that the board was now aiming for an October launch. A spokesman confirmed that timetable, saying the launch, originally planned for last year, had also been slowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Rusbridger said he did not know whether the board would hear cases about content connected to the US election.

Away from the Breonna Taylor protests for a moment, a quick snap from Reuters here that one of president Donald Trump’s most senior military advisers, retired General Paul Selva, is joining a large group of former Pentagon leaders to publicly endorse Joe Biden, according to a letter seen by the news agency.

Selva, who served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until July 2019, appears on a list of 489 national security experts - including former military leaders, ambassadors and White House officials - who signed a letter being released on Thursday that declares Trump “not equal to the enormous responsibilities of his office.”

“Thanks to his disdainful attitude and his failures, our allies no longer trust or respect us, and our enemies no longer fear us,” reads the letter by the group, called “National Security Leaders For Biden.”

Other groups of former national security leaders have endorsed Biden and criticized Trump, but, Reuters say, it is remarkable that a recently retired four-star general like Selva - who was the Pentagon’s No. 2 military officer - would publicly endorse any candidate and sign onto a letter condemning a president he served.

CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, notes:

The events of yesterday and last night are liable to push police and justice reform back into the public spotlight and make them a focus of the election campaign. Adam Mahoney has been in Chicago for us, looking at why the city is the only one in America’s top 10 not yet to agree to new police reforms, despite civil rights protests and a bloody summer of police shootings.

Community leaders are at their wits end in a city where having the largest per-capita police force in the US is not translating into less crime or less violence, especially in neighborhoods long blighted by structural racism and now slammed by the twin coronavirus and economic crises.

“This summer and the pandemic have shown us that if we want justice and love in Chicago, what we’re doing isn’t working,” said Moises Moreno, a city native and director of Pilsen Alliance, an organization on the lower west side that develops grassroots leadership in working class, immigrant communities.

Three weeks ago in the Pilsen neighborhood, a cluster of candles and flowers couldn’t quite cover the dried blood on the sidewalk where 26-year-old Miguel Vega had been shot dead by Chicago police, one of five police shootings by the department in the last two months.

A sixth shooting was carried out by a sheriff’s officer from surrounding Cook county. While county sheriff Tom Dart released bodycam footage less than a day after that wounding, Chicago Police Department failed to release any of the footage from its five shootings, until two days ago it issued bodycam from the Vega incident.

Read it here: Why Chicago hasn’t enacted police reforms despite demands for change

Here are some more of the pictures that have been coming through of a night of protest and demonstrations in many US cities.

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Like many cities in the US there was a Black Lives Matter protest in San Jose yesterday over the Breonna Taylor decision. The East Bay Times reports:

As of 6:30pm Wednesday, roughly 100 protesters had gathered outside San Jose City Hall. Among them was 25-year-old San Jose resident Daniel Barrena, who said he was disgusted the jury did not do more.

“It just shows that they’re not accountable at all to anyone,” said Barrena, who waved a Zapatista flag in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. “There’s just going to be more protests and more riots until we get the justice we deserve.”

Paris Browder said the news was “a slap in the face to me, to every Black person and to Breonna’s family specially.”

“I feel infuriated, frustrated, outraged and out of my body,” the 28-year-old San Jose resident said.

For 29-year-old San Jose resident Srishti Prabha, the indictment of a single police officer was an example “of just how much political power police have in this country.”

“It’s unfortunate that Breonna Taylor’s family is not going to get the justice they wanted,” Prabha continued. “This was a heinous crime and justice did not happen.”

Our multimedia team have put together this report, as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in more than a dozen cities across the US after a grand jury decided not to directly charge police officers for the killing of Breonna Taylor.

0:53

Pulitzer Prize winning Robin Givhan has written powerfully for the Washington Post this morning, in a piece simply titled Miss Breonna Taylor.

The Kentucky attorney general kept calling her Miss.

Miss Taylor. Miss Breonna Taylor.

He gave her that honorific, that scrap of dignity six months after she was killed.

Cameron used the genteel title — “Miss” — as a matter of formality but also as a kind of armor. The nicety would serve as evidence of his respectfulness of Taylor and of his regard for the criminal justice system. The title would also give feeble cover to the system’s indifference to the value of this 26-year-old Black woman’s life. The word would teeter atop a mountain of historical disregard that continues to grow.

She did not have a weapon. She had done nothing wrong. She was simply at home. And she was killed by police.

Cameron called her death a tragedy. That’s the least of it.

No one would be held to account for Taylor’s death. Taylor was killed and the system shrugged. But at least Cameron called her Miss.

Read it here: Washington Post – Robin Givhan: Miss Breonna Taylor

Back to Portland, where the Oregonian reports on the evening’s protests. Mark Graves writes for the paper that the demonstration started when hundreds of people filled Southwest Third Avenue in front of the downtown Justice Center:

Several Black women addressed the crowd from the steps of the Justice Center and encouraged people to vote and continue pressing for change.

As the speeches continued past 9pm, a smaller crowd started forming in front of the Second Avenue side of the Justice Center — the Central Precinct of the Portland police.

Portland police declared that gathering an “unlawful assembly shortly” before 10pm It was unclear why. Most people remained focused on the speeches on the opposite side of the building.

Police warned people to leave Second Avenue, live videos showed. Dozens of officers then advanced on the crowd, using smoke and other devices to force people to move. At least one protester responded by throwing a firework toward police.

He goes on to say

A handful of protesters targeted a police precinct with fire and rocks. Police quickly extinguished the flames as they burned the edge of an awning. But soon after, someone threw a Molotov cocktail toward officers. Police ordered the hundreds of people gathered in honor of Breonna Taylor to leave, then used force to make people move. Federal officers helped.

Federal officers shot impact munitions on downtown streets a half-mile away from the federal courthouse that President Donald Trump pledged to protect. The scene mirrored many July nights, when federal officers regularly and aggressively dispersed crowds outside the courthouse.

Read it here: Oregon Live – Portland, federal police break up downtown protest of Breonna Taylor grand jury decision

Away from the protests for a moment, the Associated Press is reporting that the US justice department is investigating a former Republican Florida Congresswoman accused of spending at least $50,000 of campaign money on vacations and restaurant and luxury hotel bills.

The federal department’s public integrity section is looking into the expenditures by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, from Miami, including a 2017 trip to Walt Disney World with her children and grandchildren, rooms at a Ritz-Carlton resort and a New Year’s Eve meal at a high-end seafood restaurant.

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Jeffrey Weiner, an attorney for Ros-Lehtinen, said in a statement to WFOR-TV, which first reported the investigation, that Ros-Lehtinen was aware of the investigation and she and former staff members and volunteers were cooperating with the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department.

In a statement to the Miami Herald, the attorney added that they are turning over campaign finance and other records subpoenaed by the Justice Department.

“We ... are confident that, if bookkeeping errors were committed, they were due to negligence, and not willful or intentional misconduct by the former congresswoman or anyone on her staff, or her accountants,” the news outlets quoted Weiner as saying.

Ros-Lehtinen declined to seek reelection in 2018 after a 30-year career in Congress. Following her retirement announcement in April 2017, she transferred more than $177,000 from her reelection campaign account to a political action committee she controlled, WFOR-TV reported. Federal law prohibits campaign funds, including those transferred to PACs from being spent on personal use.

Weiner declined to explain the campaign-related purpose of the expenditures but said his team has not “found any evidence whatsoever of intentional wrongdoing” by the former Congresswoman or her staff.

Here’s a reminder of what Kentucky attorney general, Daniel Cameron, said, urging protesters to make their voices heard peacefully after only one police officer involved in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor was indicted by a grand jury.

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Police in Portland, Oregon, have declared a riot after protesters took to the streets there over the Breonna Taylor charging decision. This is not that unusual, as the city has been the focus for months of consecutive Black Lives Matter protests, and the authorities have quite frequently taken that step.

Unusually tonight, though, the Portland police have shared a video which they say is a Molotov cocktail being hurled at them during the protests. The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the footage.

Journalist Sergio Olmos, who works for Oregon Public Broadcasting, shared a photo which showed a small fire and some damage at a Portland police bureau.