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Six years after Breonna Taylor’s death, America is weakening the rules that could have saved her | Jamil Smith

The night Breonna Taylor died began quietly.

She had spent the evening at home in Louisville. The 26-year-old was an emergency room technician, someone who worked to prevent other people’s tragedies.

After midnight, police officers arrived at her apartment with a warrant. They moved quickly, forcing open the door.

Inside, Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, did not yet know who had entered the home. (Police claim they knocked and identified themselves; Taylor’s boyfriend, as well as several neighbors, said they didn’t hear it.) In the seconds that followed – confusion, shouting, a single gunshot from Walker, who believed intruders had broken in – officers fired at least 10 shots back. Taylor was struck multiple times. She died there in the hallway.

For a brief moment after Taylor’s death on 13 March 2020, the country seemed to grasp the danger of no-knock warrants and raids, the tactic that allowed police to enter Taylor’s home. Her killing forced Americans to confront something many had never heard of: no-knock warrants, which allow officers to enter homes without announcing themselves, often in the middle of the night, in the belief that warning residents might allow suspects to destroy evidence or escape.

Taylor’s death was an awful reminder of the volatility of such encounters. A door breaks open. Someone inside believes a home invasion is under way. Someone else believes they are executing a lawful warrant. The distance between those two understandings can collapse in seconds, exploding into gunfire.

Governments across the country responded. While no officer was held criminally responsible for Taylor’s death, Louisville banned no-knock warrants entirely. Kentucky, along with other states and municipalities, also imposed limits. The justice department tightened its rules governing when federal agents could seek such warrants.

The logic was straightforward. If the danger revealed in Breonna Taylor’s apartment was real, then the practice that created that danger required strict limits.

Earlier this month, though, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice quietly rescinded those federal limits. The deputy attorney general Todd Blanche eliminated a nearly five-year-old policy restricting when no-knock warrants can be used. “We must allow our brave men and women in law enforcement to carry out their duties to the fullest extent permitted by law,” Blanche wrote in a justice department memo.

The change restores broader discretion to federal law enforcement, rolling back one of the safeguards that emerged from the national reckoning Taylor’s death briefly forced. There was no public accounting or explanation offered to anyone, much less those who took to the streets in her name. The hope, it seems, was that no one would notice.

No-knock raids never disappeared entirely. Policing in the United States remains decentralized, and thousands of local departments still retain the authority to use them. Some experts even questioned whether the federal limits adopted after Taylor’s death made much practical difference.

The justice department’s decision still sends a message, reinforcing the falsehood that restrictions meant to save lives and preserve civil rights are an impediment to effective law enforcement. It tells us how little Breonna Taylor’s life and the lessons drawn from her death matter to this administration. The risk that took her life is one they are willing to impose on the rest of us as well.

No credible justification exists for this move. Researchers, journalists and advocacy organizations have documented for years that police don’t use most Swat-style raids for hostage situations or terrorism investigations. Instead, they often terrorize residents, mostly in predominantly Black communities. No-knock raids are most often used to serve drug warrants, and many produce little evidence at all. The raid produced nothing, of course, because neither Taylor nor Walker were the people police were investigating.

What they reliably produce instead is volatility. Police enter homes suddenly and without warning. Residents inside have seconds to make sense of what is happening. Some believe criminals are breaking in. Others reach for weapons in self-defense. Officers, expecting danger, enter prepared to respond with lethal force.

The result is yet another policing tactic that regularly creates the very chaos it claims to prevent.

Breonna Taylor’s death exposed that reality with brutal clarity. The reforms that followed reflected a recognition, however fleeting, that the risks were unacceptable. What this administration’s quiet reversal tells us is that her death has been processed – grieved, protested, memorialized – and filed away.

That denial carries consequences beyond any single tactic. The home occupies a special place in American law. The fourth amendment rests on the premise that citizens are most secure there from the sudden exercise of state power. So does the long-standing expectation that officers announce themselves before entering. A no-knock raid collapses that protection entirely. The state does not merely arrive at the door. It breaks through it.

American history contains earlier reminders of what it looks like when law enforcement treats a private home as a space that suspicion alone entitles them to invade. In 1969, Chicago police burst into the apartment of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, while he slept. They shot and killed Hampton and fellow leader Mark Clark during the raid – an episode, as later revealed, shaped by false claims and federal surveillance of political activists.

Years ago, the artist Dana Chandler recreated a bullet-riddled bedroom door from the raid that killed Hampton and Clark. Standing before it, as I once did, you cannot escape the simple fact they represent: the moment when the state decides that the door to someone’s home is not a boundary but an obstacle.

Every era leaves behind its doors. The details of Hampton’s killing differ from Taylor’s, but the underlying logic is the same. The state decided that what lay behind a particular door was dangerous enough to warrant the removal of every protection that door was supposed to represent.

Sanctioned state violence against Black people in their own homes did not begin with no-knock warrants, and it will not end with them. Still, the rules matter. They won’t always save us. Too often, though, their absence has proven fatal.

The killing of Breonna Taylor forced the country to look at what happens when those rules are absent or people ignore them. The rules adopted after her death were meant to make such moments rarer. Congress even has bipartisan legislation to ban no-knock warrants nationwide: the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act. Lawmakers have introduced it repeatedly. They have never passed it. This administration has now decided such measures are an inconvenience.

What we do with that information is the question we keep refusing to answer. We grieve, and then we allow the conditions that made the grief necessary to be quietly restored. We say her name, and then we see the people in power behave as though we never did.

We know what happened in Breonna Taylor’s apartment six years ago today. We know why it happened. We know what could reduce the chances that it happens again. This administration has decided that those protections are expendable. That decision carries a message of its own: Breonna Taylor’s death did not change this country enough.