![]() Taylor’s death “could have easily been forgotten, and it was almost forgotten,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a racial justice think tank which created the #SayHerName campaign in 2014 to elevate the stories of Black women killed by police. Taylor’s family also declined to comment. “Brett Hankison did not ‘blindly’ discharge his firearm, and did not lack cognizance of the direction in which he fired, but acted in quick response to gunfire directed at himself and other officers,” Leightty wrote.Ī spokesperson for the Louisville Metro Police Department and Walker’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment. In an appeal, Hankison’s attorney, David Leightty, wrote the officer should not have been fired, noting that the FBI and the Kentucky attorney general’s office were still investigating. The Louisville police chief fired one of the officers involved, Brett Hankison, for “wantonly and blindly” shooting 10 rounds into Taylor’s home in “extreme indifference to the value of human life,” according to the letter announcing his intent to terminate the officer. But within this small subset, Black women, who are 13 percent of the female population, account for 20 percent of the women shot and killed and 28 percent of the unarmed deaths. Since 2015, Black women have accounted for less than 1 percent of the overall fatal shootings in cases where race was known. And 12 of those women killed at home were shot by officers who were there to conduct a search or make an arrest. Of the 247 women fatally shot, 48 were Black and seven of those were unarmed.Īt least 89 of the women were at their homes or residences where they sometimes stayed. But 139 other cases shared one or more of the circumstances in which Taylor was killed. The Post found only one other fatal shooting that closely matched Taylor’s case - a Black woman, unarmed, killed during a raid at home while a boyfriend shot at police. The names of these women are often not as well known as the men, but their deaths in some cases raise the same questions about the use of deadly force by police and, in particular, its use on Black Americans. Since The Washington Post began tracking fatal shootings by police in 2015, officers have fatally shot 247 women out of the more than 5,600 people killed overall. Her killing has brought into focus an often overlooked but consistent subset of people fatally shot by police - women. Her image is on magazine covers, her name emblazoned on WNBA uniforms and more than five months later, protests over her death continue in Louisville. ![]() Taylor’s name has become a rallying cry - #SayHerName - for policing overhauls and racial justice nationwide. In May, a Minneapolis police officer knelt for nearly eight minutes on the neck of 46-year-old George Floyd, fatally injuring him. ![]() In February, a retired police detective, his son and a third man allegedly killed Ahmaud Arbery, 25, in a Georgia suburb. After Louisville police fatally shot 26-year-old Breonna Taylor during a nighttime raid at her home in March, her killing could have been just another in a long line of deadly police shootings of women that have drawn little publicity.īut the death of Taylor, who was Black, fell between two high-profile killings of Black men.
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