Louisville Police Officers Involved in Breonna Taylor’s Death Finally Fired

Baby steps toward justice aren’t the most satisfying, but they are not exactly nothing, either. Finally, as David K. Li reports for NBC News, Louisville Metro Police Department detectives Joshua Jaynes and Myles Cosgrove were formally fired on Tuesday by department chief Yvette Gentry.

As Ishena Robinson writes in The Root:

Cosgrove was fired for failing to activate his body-camera during the March 13 raid in which he and two other LMPD officers, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Brett Hankison, entered Taylor’s home on a no-knock warrant granted to the police as part of a drug investigation. The officers fatally fired on 26-year-old Taylor multiple times during the raid, killing her, but none have been charged directly in her killing… Meanwhile, Jaynes, who was not present at the raid, was fired on Tuesday for his role in procuring the warrant that the officers used to enter Taylor’s home.

Previously, Brett Hankison was the only officer involved in Taylor’s death to be fired. But as Dave Gershgorn wrote in Momentum, “Hankison is not actually being charged with the killing of Taylor. The three charges he faces are for recklessly firing his weapon into a neighboring apartment with three occupants who were not hit by the shots, according to the decision… This announcement means that no officers are being directly held liable for Taylor’s murder.”