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.
This is often part of the "rules of engagement" that military personnel are expected to follow; not only because they're expected not to shoot civilians, but also peacekeeping situations where firing on the wrong forces could cause WW3, as well as the very basic check that the target isn't wearing the same uniform as you and shooting in your direction by mistake.
It's not clear whether the police were firing at the gun-holder here and missed, or whether they were firing blindly through a door, wall, or into a dark area; that is also criminally irresponsible.
I suspect you're missing something here or not communicating what you're trying to say very well -- military personnel aren't going to sit around and do nothing if they're being shot at, they're going to return fire, call for artillery on the source of the shooting, call for aircraft support to bomb the source of the shooting, call for a QRF team to help them destroy the source of the shooting, etc.
Even "peacekeeping" forces are going to return fire if fired upon.
Having the British Army fire on and kill civilians in Northern Ireland was extremely controversial. Several incidents resulted in murder trials. Some of this is still going on. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49721166
> Even "peacekeeping" forces are going to return fire if fired upon.
My point is that there have been lots of places in the 20th century where troops have been specifically ordered not to do that without senior authorisation, because of the potential political impact of an escalation.
Or at the very least carefully identify who they are going to be shooting at, and provide a warning, rather than firing blindly into residential buildings.