What Does Justice for Breonna Taylor Look Like?
By: Aidan Hess
Tags: Society, Equality, Justice, Race, Racism

There is a common refrain uttered wide and far in the aftermath of every tragic death at the hands of police: Justice. Justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, William Green.

When news broke a few days ago that the Kentucky court would not indict Breonna Taylor’s murderers for her death, no doubt there was a lack of justice. But what kind of justice were we really searching for in a grand jury indictment, anyway?

What does justice for police murders look like?

Presumably, as Jalen Rose had demanded yesterday on ESPN, it is to see the four cops arrested and charged with murder of the first degree. As a measure of “justice,” the same had been argued for the cop who killed Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and William Green. In all of these cases, then, what justice ultimately means is punishment — lock the killer cops up, make them suffer for what they did.

But is this justice, really? Is there justice in exchanging the loss of life with a prison sentence? Who does the affirmation of incarceration as a method of justice actually serve?

Such an equivalence does not serve those who are most heavily exposed to state violence. Rather, to equate the injustice of the loss of life with the “justice” of incarceration only serves those who are tending to the cells. That is to say, it legitimizes the very logic of “justice = punishment” responsible for injustice in the first place. As hard as it is to accept, jailing police officers will not bring justice for the slain victims of state violence. It will only reproduce the problem.

Concerning “what to do” with those cops responsible for these murders, I must confess I do not really know. Certainly, admittance back into society without any process of reconciliation or accountability is not acceptable. This would only serve to uphold the very unjust status quo, i.e. the wanton, state-sanctioned killing of Black people. But simply locking them up to punish them is, in my opinion, just as unacceptable.

All I do know is that these calls coming from all corners of the country to jail the cops are not really calls for “justice.” They are merely the repetition of the same punitive and carceral logics which have for centuries now criminalized Blackness and poverty. “Justice” never takes the form of a jailhouse.

On police and prison abolition

Of course, I am not the only one who thinks this way. Many Black-led violence police and prison abolition groups operate on the basis of dismantling penal and carceral logics of justice (see The Marshall Project for a depository of helpful information on these topics). These groups view the problem of state violence and criminalization of Blackness at a far more systemic level, according to which addressing the problem entails truly radical reorganizations of our relations to one another.

Rather than see jailing cops as a measure of justice for Black lives, police and prison abolitionists work to completely rework the problem of violence and conflict arbitration from its very foundation. For them, there is no equivalency between “justice” and “punishment;” indeed, the very notion that there can be is in itself unjust. Justice is not a question of punishment but transformation of the conditions of injustice.

Often police and prison abolition is (ignorantly) ridiculed for being naïve and shortsighted, for e.g. having no clue what to do with “rapists and murderers” in the absence of prisons. There are two simple responses to this charge. For one, “rapes and murders” are still occurring even with mass incarceration and heavily funded police, so at the very least such a dismissal suffers from a severe lack of imagining better ways of preventing the injustices it claims to be concerned with. More often than not, charges of naïvety are simply a veil for complacency with a system which allows such abhorrent violences to continue.

But, more importantly, police and prison abolitionists do take seriously the question of “what to do about violence.” Non-punitive and recuperative conflict arbitration is part and parcel of the very theory of abolition. No abolitionist is blind to the fact that violence will still occur in the absence of policing and prisons (although, some would say on a considerably reduced scale), but the point is to shift our perspective to the root causes of said violence. It is of course true that we can’t prevent every single accident of violence — all abolitionists are saying is that we can do a far better job of dismantling the institutions themselves responsible for begetting a great deal of violence.

Thus, the only form of justice for Breonna Taylor worth its name is one which is truly transformative of the mechanisms of state violence which caused her death. Responsibility for her murder, that is to say, does not stop at the individual officers who killed her — it corresponds to an entire structure of power vested in the punitive and carceral logics which legitimize and reproduce anti-Black violence. There is no justice without abolition of that structure of power.