-Good evening and welcome to "The Tonight Show."
Today, the Kentucky grand jury announced their decision
regarding the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor six months ago.
Obviously, this is a very emotional time,
a very difficult time,
so tonight, we'd like to start the show
by speaking to our first guest about today's news
and what it means for our country.
We're so grateful to have her join us tonight.
Please welcome from MSNBC Joy Reid.
Joy, thank you for coming on and talking to me tonight.
A decision in the Breonna Taylor murder case
came in today,
and I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
Can we first talk a little bit about who Breonna Taylor was?
She was an EMT. She was an aspiring nurse.
-She was only 26 years old.
You know, this is, you know, the woman
in the Black Lives Matter kind of panoply
of people who've been killed by police.
And she was the last one, really, to be spoken about,
which, for a lot of black women, was really grating that,
you know, everyone was following the George Floyd case
and all of these other cases
and Ahmaud Arbery and everything else.
But, you know, here was this 26-year-old EMT,
who was serving her community, who had this, you know,
all these aspirations and dreams and was her sister's best friend
and had really, like, changed her life
and found a career that she loved,
found a man that she loved,
and then she was just cut down in her apartment.
So basically, Breonna was asleep,
according to her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker,
and then they just heard a noise.
They heard somebody break in, or at least he did.
The facts as put together are partly --
they partly come from his call to her mom
saying somebody broke in and shot Breonna,
which indicates that he didn't know that it was police.
And because Kentucky is an open carry state
and he is a licensed, you know, firearms carrier,
he took out his gun to defend his girlfriend and himself
from what he thought were intruders.
He fired a shot, and the three police officers
who had come to -- they're calling it --
they're saying it was not a no-knock warrant
because they're claiming that they knocked
and they said that it was police,
but you have to remember, Jimmy, this was about 12:30 a.m.
So this is when most people are asleep.
-Wow. -And so these officers burst in,
and then they start shooting.
They say that they shot in self-defense
because Kenneth Walker shot at them,
but, again, he shot at an intruder.
The police fire back.
One of the officers, the one who was charged today,
just starts shooting.
He doesn't even come into the apartment,
and those bullets spray everywhere.
They spray into other apartments.
Some bullets are lodged into other apartments.
And after Breonna is hit five or six times --
that's been a matter of dispute --
Mr. Walker is not hit at all.
He calls the mom and says, "Someone's shot Breonna."
Breonna Taylor dies.
And then we just have these series of actions
that are extremely questionable.
Action number one is no action.
No one tries to help Breonna.
She's laying on the floor.
She is not the target of any investigation.
She's committed no crime.
She's bleeding on the floor.
No one renders aid.
Police -- they start, you know,
getting their own stories together.
Action number two -- later on, not long after that,
the boyfriend is actually charged with a crime.
They try to charge Kenneth Walker
with attempting to assault the police officers
for shooting back -- for shooting toward them
and injuring one of them in the leg.
They eventually drop those charges
because of the public outrage that says,
you've got to be kidding.
And action number three --
the person that they say they were investigating --
his name is Jamarcus Glover --
he's the ex-boyfriend of Breonna Taylor.
He was in custody already on the night of this raid.
He'd already been arrested.
So they weren't going there to look for them.
They say they were investigating drug deals he was involved in,
and they try to get him --
somebody who is already incarcerated --
and they say, "We'll let you out.
We'll give you a break, but you need to say
that Breonna Taylor was involved in your drug ring.
You say that, we'll let you out."
And don't ever say there's no honor among thieves.
There is a lot more honor, I think,
that was in that jail cell than there was among the police
because he said, "I'm not doing that.
I'm not implicating Breonna in a crime.
She was not involved in anything that I was involved in.
She had nothing to do with it."
They weren't even dating anymore.
-Wow. -So I think what you have is
a police department that allows these officers to go in
to try to search this apartment,
which they're claiming that the ex-boyfriend
used to use as a previous address --
he had listed it as his address.
And so that gives them the right to bust in and start shooting,
and today,
what the Attorney General, Daniel Cameron said is,
"Everything that happened regarding the shooting
was perfectly legal."
Coming in at 12:30 in the morning,
shooting Breonna Taylor six times
while she's in her bed,
shooting at her boyfriend, and then shooting back at him,
because he's in his castle trying to defend it,
and all of that is fine -- not rendering aid is all fine.
The only thing that was illegal was Officer Hankison didn't aim,
and because he didn't aim
and shoot Breonna Taylor with good aim
and he shot around
and put bullets into three other people's apartments,
he is guilty of endangering the lives
of the people in the other apartments.
So today what we saw was nothing regarding Breonna Taylor.
No crimes were committed,
according to the Attorney General.
The only crimes that were committed were minor crimes
of endangering the neighbors.
-And normally, don't the police officers have cameras on them
or some audio of what has happened?
-Yes, normally, police officers
are supposed to have body cameras on.
None of them had their body cameras on.
They have not been fired for that.
They have not -- There's been nothing.
Literally, these officers are free and clear,
as if everything they did was fine.
They came in without body cameras.
This warrant is a suspect thing,
which now the Attorney General has said,
"We're going to pass all of that on to the feds.
Let the feds deal with how the warrant came through.
Let the feds deal with the fact that you're raiding an apartment
at 12:30 a.m.
Let the feds deal with the shooting of Breonna Taylor.
What we're going to say is that these officers,"
in the minds of the Attorney General
and this grand jury,
who, again, were led by the Attorney General.
I've been on a grand jury.
The, you know, The prosecutor leads you
where they want you to go.
What this prosecutor has essentially said
is there's nothing wrong
with these police officers having killed this woman
and having done it without their body cameras on.
-And according to him, does that end here?
-It ends here from the point of view
of Breonna Taylor's death.
There will be no prosecution of these police officers for that.
If there are going to be any further actions taken
against these three officers,
it would have to be at the federal level.
It would be something on the order
of a civil rights violation.
But here's the problem --
the head of the Justice Department right now
is William Barr,
and he's already said quite clearly
that he believes Black Lives Matter
is some sort of an insurgency
or some sort of terrorist outfit.
And he doesn't believe that
black people have any reason to be angry
with the way that our families and our sons
and our moms and our sisters, our police,
that black people have no standing with him.
So there's zero chance
that William Barr's Justice Department
is going to do anything.
So I think the only thing that has now happened for this family
is there's been a settlement.
You know, the city of Louisville is going to pay them
a bunch of money,
but that happens all over the country.
You know, there's always a settlement.
This is part of the cost of policing.
It's built into the budget.
They'd rather settle than give justice to the families.
-You've been covering this closely.
Are you surprised by this decision?
-Nope. I'm not.
I've been covering, you know, Black Lives Matter
since the Trayvon Martin case. -Oof.
-And the only time that I've ever been surprised
was in the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore
when they were charged.
The surprise is when there are charges,
and that's only because Marilyn Mosby,
who's the Attorney General in Maryland --
she's just a different kind of attorney.
She believes that
the families have equal standing to the police,
and she's paid heavily for that.
You know, the war against her,
the political war to unseat her and take her down
because she dared to prosecute police,
you know, shows you, and I think,
is a lesson to every other --
a message to every other prosecutor.
The police are very much protected.
Their unions are the last union standing.
They're the most powerful union in America.
They're untouchable almost in these cities.
They eat up 20%, 30%, 40% of the budgets,
and built into that is the idea that taxpayers will just pay out
any families of the people killed
and that there will never be justice
because the system is designed
for their good friends in the prosecutor's office
to decide if their good friends in the police department
have done anything wrong.
You'll never get prosecutions that way.
-Has anyone heard from the family of Breonna Taylor?
-So, you know, I've been in touch with Ben Crump,
who represents the family,
but he's actually flying, you know, back and forth today.
He's heading to Louisville.
So I haven't been able to get from him what the reactions are,
but I can anticipate deep disappointment.
Attorney General Cameron says that he called the family today.
I can't imagine what that call could have been like
because I think everyone who's watched his career --
He's a -- You know, he's an associate of Mitch McConnell.
He was his guy.
I don't think anybody who's been paying attention to him
or to the way the criminal justice system works
thinks that this would have been a --
there would have been a different outcome today.
So he sort of made a pretense of compassion
saying he wakes up every morning thinking about Breonna Taylor.
It wasn't very -- it didn't come across very sincere --
I'll just put it that way --
because he really made a bigger statement
about the value of police.
His main message was very similar to the message he gave
when he spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The police are valuable.
The police are doing a great job.
The police are important.
And that was his main message today,
and I can't imagine that that was comforting to the family.
-And any thoughts on what
the reaction is going to be in Louisville?
-It's already started.
Jimmy, people are already in the streets.
And, look, you know, the reality is
black people have been in the streets
because of police brutality for decades and decades and decades.
You can go all the way back, you know, to in the '80s,
riots in Miami over police beating a man with,
you know, a giant flashlight until he died.
Watts. You can go to Harlem.
You can go to Newark, New Jersey.
You can go to Detroit.
You can go all throughout history --
'60s, '70s, '80s, just keep going --
and there have been people in the streets
demanding justice, and nothing has changed.
I can't see anything significant that has changed
in the criminal justice system in my lifetime.
You know? -Right.
-And I don't see any change
unless there is fundamental change
in, number one, we as a society have to decide
whether or not we think it's acceptable
for police to be able to enter our homes
at any time of night they want
with any amount of force they want
and kill anyone they want.
If that's the society we want,
we're just going to have more of this.
If we at some point decide,
no, policing has to have some limits.
They just can't kill anyone they want
and then tell any story they want
and not try to save the person's life after they shoot them.
We just have to decide that that's not acceptable,
because until we do, this is just going to keep happening.
-Can you stick around? I want to ask you about
some of the debate stuff coming up next Tuesday.
-Absolutely.