Police in Louisville, Ky., arrested one woman and cited several others after a group of mostly senior citizens held a silent protest on the lawn belonging to the state’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron (R), in support of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed during a no-knock police raid in March.
Local media outlets WDRB and the Louisville Courier-Journal reported that one woman told police that she would prefer to be arrested rather than leave, while others dispersed after at least six members of the group received trespassing citations.
One activist with the group, known as Louisville Showing Up for Racial Justice, told the Courier-Journal that the group was threatened with arrest immediately after arriving at Cameron’s home Thursday around 10 a.m.
“We were threatened with arrest at 10:01, and we were told to leave immediately,” 78-year-old Dotti Lockhart told the newspaper.
Members of the group are demanding that the officers involved in the no-knock raid that ended in Taylor’s death be charged; Taylor was killed after gunfire was exchanged between police and her boyfriend during the raid, with Taylor’s boyfriend explaining that he thought the unannounced officers were intruders.
“I just hope and pray they’ll meet some of the demands, but … I fear they won’t,” Julie Driscoll, 79, told the Courier-Journal at the protest. “I fear there won’t be charges because they’ll say they had a warrant and they were operating in self-defense.”
“There needs to be an accounting for all the wrongs that we’ve done over all these years, and this is a way we could do it,” her husband Bob, the same age, added. “We were willing to risk arrest.”
A spokesperson with the Kentucky attorney general’s office did not immediately return a request for comment from The Hill.
Protests over Taylor’s death and the deaths of other Black Americans during encounters with police officers have continued for months across the U.S., with many activists calling for police departments to be defunded or face greater scrutiny over their use of force policies.