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All-day street protests erupted into violence after dark when two police officers who were on duty amid the protests were shot and injured, Robert Schroeder, acting chief of the Louisvile Metropolitan Police Department, told reporters.
He said a suspect had been arrested and the two officers were in stable condition, one of them undergoing surgery, with injuries he described as non-fatal. He declined to elaborate.
Announcing the grand jury’s findings hours earlier, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said that two white police officers who shot at the apartment of black worker Taylor on March 13 will not be prosecuted for her death because of their use of the force during the raid was justified.
A third officer was charged with three counts of senseless endangering, a relatively low-level crime, stemming from the bullets he fired astray at an adjacent apartment in Taylor’s neighbors, state attorney general Daniel Cameron said.
Benjamin Crump, a prominent civil rights attorney representing the Taylor family, denounced the outcome of the grand jury investigation and said it was “outrageous” that none of the three officers involved in the raid was criminally charged with causing the death of Taylor.
Protesters immediately took to the streets chanting, “Lives Don’t Matter Until Black Lives Matter,” marching for hours through Kentucky’s largest city amid sporadic clashes with riot police.
The demonstrations continued until dusk in defiance of the 9 p.m. curfew and remained mostly peaceful until several shots were heard amid a skirmish between protesters and heavily armed police, causing members of the crowd to run. in search of refuge.
A Reuters reporter at the scene heard crowd shots fired moments after police fired pepper spray and “flash-bang” blasts at protesters.
the Louisville Courier-Journal and other local media reported that two officers were injured, and the FBI said it responded by firing at at least one officer.
Earlier in the day, about a dozen people were arrested in a clash between hundreds of protesters and a group of law enforcement officers in the Highlands neighborhood, outside of downtown Louisville.
In the Highlands neighborhood on the outskirts of the city center, several protesters threw bottles of water at police, who responded by firing pepperballs into the crowd. Fights broke out and some business windows in the area were smashed.
Demonstrations of various sizes protesting the outcome of the Louisville grand jury investigation were also held in several other cities, including New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Chicago.
Taylor, 26, was killed in front of her armed boyfriend shortly after midnight after three officers broke into her home with a search warrant.
Former detective Brett Hankison was indicted on three counts of first degree senseless endangerment, a crime that ranks among the lowest felony level in Kentucky and carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison.
Cameron said those three charges stem from the fact that some of the blasts Hankison fired, ten in all, traveled through Taylor’s apartment to an adjacent unit where a man, a pregnant woman and a child were at home.
Cameron, however, said there was no “conclusive” evidence that any of Hankison’s bullets hit Taylor.
The other two officers, Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, were not charged because they were justified under Kentucky law to return fire after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot them, wounding Mattingly in the thigh, Cameron said.
“There is no question that this is an emotional and heartbreaking case,” Cameron, a black Republican, said at a news conference.
Reuters
