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.
Then I expect police to take the strategy of simply retreating and getting to safety.
Obviously that’s associated with a higher risk for the police but to my mind that is a risk police have to accept if they want to be able to execute search warrants like that. It comes with the territory.
The other alternative is to not execute search warrants in that way.
I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about this as I'm a former service member who is generally kind of paranoid of people breaking into my safe spaces. In the Marine Corps, there's pretty much two tactical options we are trained to choose from when taking fire: either immediately assault the enemy with fire and maneuver, or break contact and find cover.
An immediate assault should only be used if you know the relative size of the enemy, you're rules of engagement support an assault, and there's no hard cover available. Immediately returning fire increases the likelihood of getting your people killed, but retains the initiative, which is great if the enemy force is likely to advance on your position. There is no benefit of doing this if the enemy is just going to sit behind cover taking pot shots; better to draw them out and gain the cover advantage.
All of that is to say that the police had NONE of those qualifications. There is literally no reason not to pull back. By returning fire, they put themselves in MORE danger, and for no reason. That is the reaction that untrained animals take, not a disciplined unit.