A key fact is that the police shot Taylor after her boyfriend shot at the police, thinking they were intruders. While he was fully entitled to do that, the NYT doesn’t believe in gun rights so that’s a messy fact. To make the victim seem more sympathetic, the narrative under the heading “What Happened in Louisville?” doesn’t mention Taylor‘s boyfriend shooting first. Instead, you need to go down several paragraphs to learn that fact. Which leaves the whole article deeply confused: at first you think police just started shooting for no reason, and then later you learn they shot because they were fired upon. Which of course leaves the reader with little understanding of what police actually did wrong. Were they not supposed to shoot back when Taylor’s boyfriend shot at them? Is that the problem?
Obviously nobody expects the police not to shoot back when fired upon. What the police did wrong, instead, is failing to respect black peoples’ second and fourth amendment rights. This happened in Kentucky, where if you barge into someone’s house in the middle of the night you can expect to get shot. Police barging into people’s homes in the middle of the night unannounced is fundamentally incompatible with what the Constitution and Kentucky law gives homeowners the right to do: shoot at intruders in their home. And as such the practice of serving these no-knock warrants is an infringement of that right. It leads to tragic consequences under predictable circumstances where homeowners are just exercising their rights. And of course, it’s doubtful that officers display the same callousness to the possibility of armed homeowners when it comes to policing white neighborhoods. It’s another one in a long pattern of cases where black people are murdered for daring to exercise their second amendment rights.
I can attest that in most of the other countries of the world, you can't point a gun at the police and get away with it.
Most importantly, you can't even talk about this case in the media, you can't sue the government, you can't hire a lawyer to fight against the government, your family will be threatened and you surely won't receive a 5 million dollar settlement that all US shootings inevitably end up with.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that I don't live in China. But it's pretty embarrassing for the richest and most powerful country in the world (allegedly bearing the mantle of freedom and democracy and Enlightenment values), to have to compare ourselves to totalitarian dictatorships to feel better about ourselves, instead of other democracies, most of whom have yearly counts of deaths by law enforcement in the single digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
It seems like a lot, but then consider that only 5% of people killed by police in the US were unarmed. The other 95% were armed, and most of those cases seem to be actual criminals rather than ordinary people like Breonna Taylor's boyfriend.
I'm with you on the American police being quite distinct from other police forces, and there's a lot of criticism to be made about them - like failure to keep proper statistics about police killings - but I think it's also fair to consider the circumstances that they work in.
As for your first point, many of the things can be true at the same time: US puts too many people into jails, there is too much crime in the US, and there are ways to obtain justice that are not available in most other countries (mass media, social media, courts).
You say this so casually, like the 95% of people killed deserve to be dead? Most other developed countries had problems with guns, and have dealt with it by restricting them, not by making the police militarised and just shooting more 'bad guys'