Breonna Taylor Case Update Involves a $12 Million Settlement and Police Reform

The officers obtained a no-knock warrant that would have allowed them to enter without announcing themselves, though police have said that they knocked and announced themselves at Taylor’s door.

The city of Louisville passed a new law earlier this year, named after Breonna Taylor, that bans the use of no-knock warrants.

Under the settlement’s guidelines, officers must get approval from a commander of higher rank than a sergeant before asking a judge for a warrant.

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Kraska said that he has worked with police departments where the number of requests for no-knock warrants dropped by 95 percent when they were required to go through a chief or a captain.

Those in the higher ranks are going to give the requests more scrutiny, he said, and will be more likely to say, “‘I don’t see where you’ve made the case that you need to bring a 32-person SWAT team to the door of this home.'”

Brian Dunn, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in police misconduct, said whatever reforms are approved will only succeed if the officers’ direct commanders are onboard.

“What is written on paper, and what is trained in the academy are far less significant than the unwritten attitudes of the superiors overseeing the rank and file officers in any particular station,” Dunn, Managing Partner of the Cochran Firm California, wrote in an email to the AP.

“To a very large extent, the only directive that a police officer will truly heed, and respect, must come from another sworn, superior officer.”

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One of the reforms Fischer introduced on Tuesday would provide incentives for officers to live in the neighborhoods they patrol.

Community activists have argued that police officers who live far removed from their beats are not invested in the cities where they work.

Some cities have police residency requirements, a movement that took root in the 1970s to diversify police departments.

In 2017, the city of Sacramento, California, began offering a $5,000 incentive to encourage officers to purchase a home in the city.

But some officers take issue with living in the community where they work, saying it forces them to come into contact with people they've arrested when they're off-duty or to routinely revisit places where they’ve seen tragedies.