Editors’ Expressions: Lives Still to Save

In the tilt-a-whirl madness of 2020, it would have been easy for Breonna Taylor to get lost.

Her final moments weren’t captured on excruciating video, like George Floyd’s. She wasn’t chillingly targeted and hunted, like Ahmaud Arbery. She was collateral damage—an ancillary casualty of a long-lost drug war. Not the person they were looking for; not cohabiting with him. She’d dated him—close enough.

Taylor was killed, but she didn’t get lost. The 26-year-old Louisville EMT, fatally shot multiple times in a March police raid gone awry, got remembered. Her case began to collect attention, then outrage. Over time and somewhat unexpectedly, she grew into as much of a cause célèbre as the men whose high-profile deaths bracketed hers.

Floyd has, rightly, been at the epicenter of this summer’s protests. But Taylor’s name and smiling uniform photo have been nearly as widespread. And she’s developed her own cadre of advocates, celebrity and non-, working diligently to make sure she’s honored and her death helps propel change.

LeBron James and other NBA players have spoken out for her. The WNBA dedicated its season to her and the “Say Her Name” movement. Hunger strikers starved themselves. Megastars like Beyoncé marked her birthday. Currently Taylor is the first person besides Oprah Winfrey to appear on the cover of Winfrey’s magazine, O. Winfrey also paid for 26 billboards around Louisville calling for the officers who killed her to be charged.

From the tragedy of her premature death, Taylor has remarkably become a national cause and near-household name.

While no decent person celebrates the death of another member of the EMS family or any innocent human, Taylor’s is the kind of death Americans prefer to ignore. We don’t like to think about the justice system’s misfires. We don’t want to believe racism might play any part in the drug war. Even among EMS readers are those who want to just move on, nothing to see here, let it go, however egregious anyone’s possible conduct.

Sorry, no. The legal monopoly on killing should come with the highest possible level of accountability. Scrutinizing raids that kill innocent people is no more “anti-police” than the NTSB investigating plane crashes is “anti-pilot.” In any industry, if your job performance leads to a healthy person dying, you ought to expect some intense (and to some degree public) QA.

(I might also suggest that a whole lot of EMS people would have, like Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, themselves come up shooting at midnight home invaders—about the most legitimate use of a firearm possible. There but for the grace go a lot of us, no?)

For many more, though, within EMS and without, Taylor resonates. Maybe people realize that could have been them, incidentally targeted over some shady past associate. Maybe it’s her smile or kind face. Maybe it’s her identity as an EMT—for all of EMS’s discrepancies in glory with law enforcement and fire, America knows one of the good guys when it sees one.

Certainly, timing was part of it: Rather than drowning Taylor’s case out, its proximity to the Floyd and Arbery deaths magnified it. One crash at an intersection is easy to ignore; three in succession might make you reconsider its design.

Maybe enough is just finally enough.

There’s no silver lining here. No benefit derived from Taylor’s death—a larger awareness of racial inequities, or shifting opinions about treatment by the government, or a more restrained approach to dangerous tactical responses—outweighs the value of her life or the good she might have done.

But such cold comfort might be all we can extract, so let’s extract it. Be angry about Taylor’s death, but refocus the rage into something positive—be it community policing, mental health resources, or criminal justice reform. Make it matter by making things better.

If even one judge takes a second look at one weak warrant, Taylor might not be done saving lives.

John Erich is the senior editor of EMS World.