Outrage after officer who killed Breonna Taylor is hired as deputy sheriff

24 April 2023

To critics of War on Drugs, the Breonna Taylor case is a textbook example of why U.S. drug policy has been an abysmal failure — and one with a long list of innocent victims. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician in Louisville, Kentucky, was pursuing a career in nursing when, on March 13, 2020, she was fatally shot during a drug raid in an apartment where she was living.

Taylor wasn't involved in drug trafficking in any way, but Louisville police suspected that drug-related activity was taking place in that apartment. Three police officers were involved in that raid — Myles Cosgrove, Jonathan Mattingly and Brett Hankison — and Cosgrove, according to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, fired the shot that killed Taylor.

Cosgrove was fired by the Louisville Police Department following an investigation, but according to Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels, he has found a new job in law enforcement — this time, with the Carroll County Sheriff's Office in Kentucky. That agency, Michaels reports in an article published on April 23, has "confirmed" the hiring to local reporters.

Bianca Austin, Taylor's aunt, is vehemently critical of the Carroll County Sheriff's Office for hiring Cosgrove. Austin told Mother Jones, "This is a prime example of how police officers are protected," adding that they are "able to get away with such vicious crimes with no accountability."

An Associated Press/Guardian report notes, "Louisville city officials in December agreed to pay $2m to settle two lawsuits filed by Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. And last month, a federal Justice Department investigation prompted by Taylor's killing found that Louisville police engaged in unlawful practices that breached locals' civil rights while discriminating against both Black people as well as people with behavioral health deficiencies."

Rob Miller, a chief deputy with the Carroll County Sheriff's Office, has defended their decision to hire Cosgrove. Miller told the Louisville Courier Journal, "We think he will help reduce the flow of drugs in our area and reduce property crimes. We felt like he was a good candidate to help us in our county."

Activists in Kentucky, Michaels notes, are planning protests for Monday, April 24.

Mattingly has been defending Cosgrove and the Carroll County Sheriff's Office on Twitter. In an April 22 thread, Mattingly wrote, "I'm sick of these social justice warriors, who have no clue what the facts are, spreading lies and misinformation. Keyboard warrior mentality hurts real people, their kids, and family members."

But many other Twitter users believe that hiring Cosgrove was a terrible decision by the Carroll County Sheriff's Office.

Twitter user Arman Guerrero, @staynfresh84, posted, "Of course they still love these guys…. other cops love these kinds of cops because they feel that their actions were okay and that gives them more of a right to abuse their power."

@DexterDawg5 posted, "Killing Breonna Taylor hurt real people a lot more than any keyboard warrior.

Amy Jean Tyler, @AmyJeanTyler, a Kentucky-based activist, has no sympathy with Mattingly's claim that Cosgrove is being persecuted. Tyler, who posted a mock wanted poster depicting Cosgrove, wrote, "Someone play a violin for me please…. They create the chaos and then cry it’s not me."

Twitter user Douglas Garrett, @DouglasRancid, slammed Cosgrove's defenders as "typical oath keepers and proud boys type of people." And @kas0966 wrote, "That's the problem with the individual counties with individual police forces. They should be all under one roof as a state police force. They can be placed in any county within that state. Then there should be federal police that has power over state police. Then it won’t happen."

Journalist Radley Balko, author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces," has been a scathing critic of no-knock drug raids and the War on Drugs in general. And he believes that Taylor's death marked an important turning point.

In an October 15, 2021 op-ed for the Washington Post, Balko wrote, "It's hard to overstate just how much Taylor's death has changed the politics of this issue. No-knock raids as a policy have been around for nearly 60 years. Yet, despite the long trail of innocent bodies left in their wake, it wasn't until last year that, for the first time in a generation, lawmakers finally began to ask if sending armed cops barging into homes in the middle of the night might not be the best way to prevent drug addiction. The dirty secret about the no-knock raid is that it was never a tactic that emerged out of law enforcement organically. Instead, it was a policy born of politics, a wedge issue concocted to exploit middle-class fears about crime and drugs."

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