The year has kicked off with the firing of two officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor.
Louisville Metro Police Department Detectives Joshua Jaynes and Myles Cosgrove were formally fired on Tuesday by department Chief Yvette Gentry, according to NBC News.
The two officers were forewarned of their terminations in notices last week, as we previously reported.
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. Hankison, however, was also fired last year and charged with wanton endangerment for shooting into neighboring apartments during the incident.
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. Jaynes had sworn in an affidavit that he had verified with a postal inspector that a suspected drug dealer had been receiving packages at Taylor’s home, evidence a judge considered when he granted the no-knock warrant that led to the fatal raid. That information later turned out to be untrue.
“Detective Jaynes did not have contact with a US Postal Inspector, he received the information from Sergeant Mattingly, who got it from a Shively Police Officer,” Gentry wrote in his notice of termination to Jaynes, reported NBC.
Jaynes, unsurprisingly, is still refusing to take responsibility for his role in the fatal debacle that took a young woman’s life. He is planning to appeal his firing, his lawyer said.
“He did nothing wrong. Joshua Jaynes did nothing wrong,” Jayne’s attorney, Thomas Clay told NBC. “If there is any culpability, it goes to the highest levels of Louisville metro government.”
How about we agree that both the officers and the wider system that allowed them to go on this midnight raid on faulty information are culpable? I think that’s the very least we can do, given that no one has faced any legal consequences for Taylor’s death.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the fired cops end up being hired by another police department—after all, this is a whole problematic system, not just a problem in Louisville.