Legal, but still feels wrong
Editorial reactions
Regarding “Tragic, but right call,” (A16, Sept. 25): It’s very rare when I agree with your position on anything, but your editorial about the grand jury’s decisions concerning the police officers responsible for Breonna Taylor’s death is one such instance. You identified the key fact that no-knock warrants need to be banned and particularly in low-level drug cases. Anyone who becomes aware of unidentified intruders in their home is likely to start shooting if they have a weapon — this is to be expected. You also said the grand jury’s decisions, although legally justified, seem horribly wrong. I believe the reason the outcome seems wrong is because it’s easy to envision a very different outcome if the intruder had been instead a young Black male who broke in and then started shooting anything that moved when the lawful occupants opened fire. I think this is another key issue that needs attention — whether we start holding law enforcement to higher standards when they kill or injure someone in the course of raids which are unnecessary or conducted at the wrong address or based on mistaken identity. I appreciate how difficult the job of law enforcement is — but when lives are being lost due to unnecessary or erroneous operations, law enforcement can’t just continue to say “oopsie” and move on. Our society will come unraveled if much more of this sort of thing happens.
Greg Groh, Porter
You got itwrong. I amawhite male born and raised in the South, so I am assumed to have a stereotyped viewpoint on race relations. But to consider it lawful for the police to burst into a residence and start blowing people away is unthinkable. It was not right in Jim Crow South, and it ain’t right now. And no amount of chest thumping like Houston Police Officers Union’s Joe Gamaldi did regarding the raid at Harding Street will make it right. If that is legal in Kentucky, or Texas,
then somebody needs to change that. JoeWilliams, League City