87 Louisville protesters charged with felony
Sitting on the green grass of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s front lawn, dozens of peaceful protesters in matching face masks and T-shirts on Tuesday afternoon chanted, “Breonna Taylor, say her name!”
The activists had come to demand that Cameron, a rising star in the Republican Party and the state’s first Black attorney general, charge the three police officers who fatally shot Taylor, 26, inside her home while executing a no-knock warrant on March 13.
Cameron asked police to remove the protesters from his property, a Louisville Metro Police Department spokesman said in a statement. When 87 demonstrators refused to leave, officers arrested them one-by-one. Each was charged with a felony and two misdemeanors, police told the Post.
“Due to their refusal to leave the property and their attempts to influence the decision of the Attorney General with their actions, each person was charged with Intimidating a Participant in a Legal Process,” a police spokesman said. They also face disorderly conduct and trespassing charges, both misdemeanors.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky denounced the felony charges filed against the protesters, calling them “overblown, outrageous and inappropriate.”
A spokeswoman for Cameron’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night, but the attorney general gave a statement to local TV station WAVE.
“The stated goal of today’s protest at my home was to ‘escalate,’ ” Cameron said in the statement. “That is not acceptable and only serves to further division and tension within our community. Justice is not achieved by trespassing on private property, and it’s not achieved through escalation.”
Until Freedom had advertised Tuesday’s demonstration as a “time to escalate.”
“It has been 116+ days since Breonna Taylor has been murdered by the Louisville Police Department and no one has been held accountable,” the group said on its website. “We must now escalate our actions so that the powers that be know, we will not stop until we get justice for Breonna and her family.”
Police shot Taylor eight times after forcing their way into her
Louisville apartment with a battering ram after midnight on March 13. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired one shot at the plainclothes officers, whom he said he believed were intruders.
More than three months after police shot Taylor, the Louisville Metro Police Department said in a letter that it had fired Detective Brett Hankison for violating multiple department policies and showing “extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he “blindly” fired 10 bullets into Taylor’s home. Two other officers have been placed on administrative duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation.
But none of the officers involved in Taylor’s death, including Hankison, have been criminally charged.