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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. It's been 895 days since Breonna Taylor was awakened from her sleep and gunned down inside her home on March 13th, 2020. Police officers had rammed their way into her apartment, and they shot her to death. Allegedly searching for Taylor's former boyfriend whom they suspected of dealing drugs.

For Breonna's family the road to justice has been long. Earlier this month, more than two years after her death, the Department of Justice filed charges against four former and current Louisville, Kentucky police officers in connection with Breonna's death. Here's what that meant to Breonna's mom, Tamika Palmer.

Tamika Palmer: Today's overdue, but it still hurts.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On Tuesday, one of those officers, former Louisville Metro Police Detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty for helping falsify information in order to obtain a search warrant, which the Justice Department said resulted in Taylor's death. She also pled guilty to covering it up by lying to investigators about it after the fact. Goodlett will be the first officer convicted for playing any part in Breonna Taylor's death, and she faces five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Joining us to talk about the case is Treva Lindsey, Professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Welcome back to The Takeaway, Treva.

Treva Lindsey: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's been more than two years since Breonna Taylor was killed. What has been taking so long?

Treva Lindsey: I'm surprised we're even being taken here, to be quite honest with you. I think that having some measure of accountability for the egregiousness of what happened to Breonna Taylor, I can't even imagine what that means to her loved ones right now. I don't believe that there's justice for her. She will never be back here. Even these charges, although there's some sense of exhale and relief that comes with these, we are learning the extent to which this criminal legal system so egregiously attacked the life of Breonna Taylor and endangered so many other people in its process, with reckless abandon and with intentionality, and with such harm attached to how they were approaching this, and maliciousness that we're seeing as we unfold this larger kind of conspiracy that surrounds this killing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does Breonna Taylor's case, both the experiences of brutality that you're talking about here and the more than two years to get to even this point, what does it tell us about the girls and women who have been vulnerable to state violence whose names perhaps aren't less frequently spoken when we are discussing this?

Treva Lindsey: When I first heard about Breonna Taylor, what I immediately thought of was Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a Black girl who was killed by police while she was asleep on her grandmother's couch. Sadly, so often, when we're looking at fatal police violence against Black women and girls, they're waking up to a storm of bullets. They're at their homes in mental distress, in need of assistance and help, and are gunned down.

We could talk about Deborah Danner. We can talk about Aiyana Stanley-Jones. We can talk about Eula Love. Now, we can say, Breonna Taylor, and that's not a list I want anyone to be a part of, but it is a way that we have to think about, the intimate spaces, the so-called safe spaces that Black women and girls have that are so often violated by the arm of state violence.

I think that matters a lot in terms of how we mobilize because we don't have this spectacular sight. We think of the work here of Shatema Threadcraft that's talking about the intimacy of the home and that the violence that Black women endure with regards to police violence, quite often happens in these more private spaces, in the spaces that we deem safe.

I can't even imagine what it means to wake up to a hail of bullets. You're waking up to your death. Those last moments, my heart breaks for thinking about her family, thinking about those last moments, and the family and loved ones of all of those who've been gunned down in such a violent and unnecessary manner.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to go to exactly this point that you've emphasized here, Treva, that so frequently the violence, even state violence against Black women and girls, occurs in more private settings, in their homes, in their grandmama's house. There is an audio recording. There is a phone call of Breonna's boyfriend calling. It is heart-wrenching.

I only ever listened to it once and couldn't even get all the way through it, but there isn't video. There isn't Darnella Frazier standing on that street corner capturing the death in those moments. Would it have made a difference if this had been more public, more spectacular in the sense of a spectacle?

Treva Lindsey: I think it would have made a small difference, but I think what happens is that we have the murder of Breonna Taylor, and two months later, we have the murder of George Floyd that is caught by as you said by Darnella Frazier, and those cases become forever intertwined into our national, and in many ways, global consciousness about racism, policing, police brutality, fatal state violence in ways that I think are so significant, because Breonna Taylor is a figure who to an extent becomes memeified and fetishized as a victim.

She becomes, in some ways, singular in our understanding of fatal police violence against Black women and girls, which is an unjust their burden for her to bear even as someone who's no longer with us, but she does become illustrated for so many people, and what I want us to do and to be sure that we're doing as a reminder that she is someone's loved one as we talk about this, and we bear witness to what has happened with her, and I think bearing witness for so many of us is about that visual vocabulary and recognition of the kind of violence.

I think the audio helps to intensify how we understand it and feel it. It registers with us. It's a sensory response that we're having to her death, but I still think even that visual language would have allowed an even deeper connection to what happened, and less speculation about what occurred that night, because we don't have speculation about George Floyd, and even within that, he's criminalized. There's an attempt to criminalize him even within that moment. We can certainly have all of these criminalizing narratives about Breonna Taylor that are circulating, and ultimately that false narratives that impact how she was taken in by police. She's killed. She's not seen just as a suspect. She's seen as someone who deserves to die.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You said that there can be no true measure of justice that no matter what, Breonna Taylor is gone. Help me understand the ways that we can reflect on the idea that the one person so far who has been held to a level of accountability on this is certainly legally culpable here, but also a bit of an enabling figure rather than one of the officers who actually did the shooting. What does that tell us?

Treva Lindsey: Sadly, I think it tells us that the criminal legal system is willing to sacrifice one of its own agents to maintain some semblance or appearance in its own formation, in its own figuration of being just that, "Look, we will punish this. This was wrong," but those officers who went in had no idea that this was incorrect information, and therefore acted in a way that is compliant with our standards, that is compliant with the way that policing operates, which is troubling.

That's the point that even if they did act according to policy, the policy is the problem. The criminalizing ways that we engage Black people and Black communities, in particular poor and working-class Black communities, is the problem. Having the person who falsifies and helps to create a criminalizing narrative around Breonna Taylor is substantial. It means something, but what it doesn't do is indict a system. It further pushes us towards this narrative of a bad actor. There's someone who did something wrong as opposed to systemic wrong, systemic death to the way, which is what it would mean to hold those officers accountable and the policies that colluded to create this context of death and destruction.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Treva Lindsey is Professor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at The Ohio State University. Thank you so much for your time.

Treva Lindsey: Thank you for having me.

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