Breonna Taylor factor: How will Cameron’s handling of case play into KY governor’s race?

When Breonna Taylor became a household name across the United States in 2020, so, too, did Daniel Cameron.

The fatal police shooting of the 26-year-old Black woman in her Louisville apartment galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement, spurred protests in streets across the nation and motivated activists demanding search warrant reform in numerous states.

As Kentucky attorney general, Cameron’s office led the special investigation into the Louisville Metro Police shooting, which ultimately resulted in no criminal charges for Taylor’s death.

For his handling of the case, Cameron has been called out by A-list celebrities, seen demonstrators descend on his front lawn and received death threats. His social media posts are still, three years later, often flooded with mentions of Taylor, and some of his public appearances draw protesters and chants of her name.

Taylor and Cameron are inextricably linked for many Americans in a way that is often deeply unfavorable for the 37-year-old Republican politician. With just three governor’s races in the country this year — and Kentucky poised to be the most expensive and competitive among them — the Cameron vs. Gov. Andy Beshear contest is likely to receive much national attention.

But will Taylor be on Kentuckians’ minds when they vote come November?

“Nationally, a lot of folks are going to be coming into this race will know (about Taylor) and they’ll probably, in the first sentence or two to describe Cameron, put this in his bio,” said Republican former Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who is backing Cameron. “But I don’t know that the average Kentucky voter, I don’t think that’s the first thing they’re going to put in his bio.”

Kentucky is not a particularly racially diverse state — about 87% of the population is white, and just under 9% is Black — and recent voter registration numbers show the already conservative state becoming even more red.

But for some voters, especially in Taylor’s adopted hometown of Louisville — which is about 24% Black — casting a ballot against Cameron could be a strong draw, a small proxy for the justice they believe she was wrongly denied.

“I think Daniel Cameron makes a grave mistake by underestimating Black women,” said prominent Louisville activist and writer Hannah Drake. “You know, 2020 took a lot out of me, and I have stopped doing a lot of things. The only thing I am committed to — the only thing — is to make sure that Daniel Cameron will never be governor of Kentucky.”

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While Taylor’s mother Tamika Palmer has partnered with local activists and the national group Until Freedom in an effort to defeat the GOP nominee, the first three months of general election season have come and gone with scant few critical mentions of Cameron’s role in the Taylor investigation. Groups backing Beshear have largely focused on Cameron’s connections to unpopular former Gov. Matt Bevin, while the governor’s campaign messaging focuses on economic development and his leadership in times of disaster.

Cameron, for his part, has not shied away from his decisions on the matter. He’s featured footage of protesters at his home in a television ad and described his prosecutorial actions as “the right thing to do” in a campaign email blast.

Jasmyne Jones, a Breonna Taylor Fellow at the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, said she believes the Taylor case could motivate some voters to cast ballots against Cameron — but Beshear and his supporters shouldn’t count on that alone to win the race.

“If Democrats are banking on that, I think there needs to be more substance,” Jones said. “Don’t let the message be, ‘I’m the lesser of two evils.’ Don’t let the message be, ‘You know what he did?’ What would you do instead? ... Because at the end of day, we’re still feeling the repercussions of Daniel Cameron being in office, and while a Black woman was the face of that, police brutality and what it is also affects poor white people and those communities.”

What happened to Breonna Taylor?

Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were in bed at Taylor’s south Louisville apartment in the early morning hours of March 13, 2020, when a group of seven plainclothes LMPD officers gathered outside the unit’s front door. The officers came equipped with a search warrant signed the day before, authorizing them to search for drugs and cash that police alleged she was holding for her ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover.

Officers knocked around 12:40 a.m., but neither Taylor nor Walker answered the door. Officers say they announced their presence — a claim disputed by Walker and residents of neighboring apartments — and eventually used a battering ram to force entry to Taylor’s home. That’s when Walker fired one round from his legally owned handgun, striking Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the thigh. In turn, Mattingly and detectives Myles Cogrove and Brett Hankison fired a collective 32 shots into the apartment.

Officers’ bullets hit Taylor six times, and she bled out in the hallway of her ground-floor apartment.

Walker was subsequently arrested for assault and attempted murder of a police officer. It was that pending case against Walker — which was dismissed before the end of May — that led to Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine claiming a conflict of interest and requesting the Office of the Attorney General appoint a special prosecutor to review police conduct. Citing the “heavy workload” of the investigation, Cameron’s office kept the case.

After a tense summer of protests and chants of “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor,” Cameron’s team convened a Jefferson County grand jury in September. The grand jury returned an indictment against just one officer, Hankison, for endangering Taylor’s neighbors. At a news conference the same afternoon, Cameron said “our investigation showed — and the grand jury agreed — that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in the return of deadly fire after having been fired upon.”

Just a few days later, a grand juror hired an attorney to demand the release of the audio recordings of the secret proceedings and permission to speak freely about the presentation. The same night, Cameron’s office admitted “the only charge” presented was for Hankison’s three counts of wanton endangerment.

Hankison was ultimately acquitted on all counts of wanton endangerment at trial in early March 2022, but his legal reprieve was short-lived as the federal Department of Justice brought two civil rights charges against him. Three other officers are also charged for falsifying information on the warrant for Taylor’s apartment and attempting to cover it up after the fact.

‘Followed the law’ or ‘an issue of honesty’?

Since the initial prosecution — and in the face of the federal charges — Cameron has remained steadfast in his defense of how he and his team handled the case.

“I think Kentucky agrees with me that Ms. Taylor’s death was a tragedy and that I followed the law,” Cameron told the Herald-Leader in written answers to questions about the Taylor case. “I have, in the past, both publicly and privately, expressed my sincere condolences to the Taylor family. ... However, Kentuckians know my obligation is to follow the law, no matter what — even when protesters show up on my lawn. That’s what I’ve done as Attorney General, and that’s what I’ll do as Governor.”

As governor, Beshear’s involvement in the case and aftermath was limited. He did activate the National Guard to respond to protests in Louisville in 2020, and in 2021 he signed a bill passed by the GOP-controlled General Assembly that would restrict the use of no-knock search warrants — like that obtained for Taylor’s apartment — across the state. Taylor’s family was at his side for the signing.

But on the campaign trail, Beshear focuses his message on “the future of Kentucky,” including “leading in a way that relies on faith and compassion and includes everyone.”

When asked by the Herald-Leader about Cameron’s handling of the case, Beshear said the attorney general’s conduct “raises an issue of honesty.”

“I have never seen, in my time as attorney general — or ever, for that matter — grand jurors coming forward, saying that a prosecutor lied about what was presented to them and has misled the public,” Beshear said at a campaign stop in Louisville. “That’s a pretty big deal regardless of where you are and what the case is, but it’s an especially big deal here.”

Kevin Glogower, the Louisville attorney who represented all three grand jurors who came forward to speak about the case, said Cameron’s misrepresentation of the grand jurors’ decision should “absolutely be a liability” in his quest for higher office.

“It directly goes to his veracity in the statements that he makes to the public as a public official, but also at the same time, it shows his gross incompetence in what he was attempting to do,” Glogower said. “Had he actually known how a grand jury normally works, and presented that case in the normal fashion, there could have been a different result. ... Instead, they were given a kind of paint-by-numbers that was designed by somebody else to get to a result.

“When you look at someone seeking higher office, that is not something that the public wants to see. They want to see things done fairly. They want to see people treated equally. And, they want to know that no matter what your job is, your race, your background, whatever the case may be, that the law is applied evenly and fairly.”

What role could national groups play in backing Beshear?

Cameron said liberals may hope Taylor is the first thing people think of with him, but he believes Kentuckians “associate me with opposing the radical leadership we’ve seen” under the Beshear administration.

There is at least one effort to mobilize voters against Cameron because of the Taylor case. In June, on what would have been Taylor’s 30th birthday, her family and national social justice group Until Freedom announced the “#StopCameron” campaign. The group promised to open field offices in Louisville and Lexington and lead a voter mobilization effort.

However, nearly two months later there’s been little progress shared publicly. Until Freedom did not respond to multiple requests from the Herald-Leader for updates, and recent social media posts indicate the group is still trying to raise $500,000 by selling t-shirts.

Cameron said he’s not worried about Until Freedom.

“I am confident my values match the values of Kentuckians,” he said. “I am not concerned with them matching the whims of those in California or the liberals in Washington, D.C.”

Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., a professor and the director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, pointed to the lack of a centralized campaign against Cameron as it relates to Taylor as a shortcoming of the modern Black Lives Matter movement.

“Why don’t they have a PAC running ads against Cameron in Kentucky to help Beshear?” Tillery said. “These are the kinds of questions that people should be asking about Black Lives Matter, is that in the state of Breonna Taylor, where the guy who protected the police is running, why in the heck don’t they have a PAC going to gin up Black votes for the other guy?”

Tillery said groups backing Beshear should be running ads in Black and brown communities in Kentucky about Cameron and Taylor.

“My academic research and my practical experience on the ground shows me that those messages win,” he said. “They do move, they do mobilize people.”

Beshear should let an outside group handle those attacks, Tillery said, but the governor should, when he visits Black communities, “talk it up, and I think you talk up what a kind of racial justice reform platform looks like.”

Tillery said there’s no comparable instances of someone in a position similar to Cameron seeking higher office. In Jefferson County, Circuit Court Judge Mary Shaw, who signed off on the falsified warrant for Taylor’s apartment, lost her bid for re-election in November. Wine, the late commonwealth’s attorney who died earlier this year, wasn’t slated for re-election until 2024.

Grayson, the GOP former elected official, said he anticipates the biggest way this could play out for Beshear is his ability to raise money across the country.

“It’s a way to make this race a little bit more national, from a donor standpoint, than it might otherwise be,” Grayson said. “That’s important. Even if that’s the only way it plays out, that really matters because then it gives the Beshear campaign additional resources to use whatever message they think is the most effective to win.”

Jones, the law student and young Democrat, said Beshear also has to understand and respect that Taylor’s death is more than a civil rights movement — a fine line to walk.

“Someone’s daughter died,” Jones said. “Then the whole country spent years calling her daughter a thug, a degenerate, a drug dealer’s whore. He’s being respectful, because what if that was his daughter? What if that was one of his children? No one wants their child to die and the next day, immediately, that is a political talking point. I think he’s being respectful. But, he’s in circles, saying Breonna Taylor’s name. There’s no doubt in my mind. And he is uplifting, Black electeds so that we will never have to say another person’s name.”

Did prosecution bolster Cameron’s ‘back the blue’ credibility?

Whether voters feel Cameron fixed the outcome from the beginning to protect police, or reached the correct legal conclusion in the end, there’s little question the case has bolstered his ‘back the blue’ bonafides.

Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist backing Cameron and political commentator, said that perception will likely serve Cameron well in Kentucky and may actually put Beshear in a tougher spot with some of his supporters.

Cameron’s gubernatorial campaign leans hard on his support for law enforcement, but Beshear isn’t ceding ground on that front. The Democrat also touts his police endorsements and big raises for Kentucky State Police troopers.

“He knows which way the wind blows, I assume, when it comes to views on the police versus views on that may be espoused by some of Beshear’s liberal flank,” Jennings said. “But it does cause political problems any time you’re in a campaign or you’re trying to hold a constituency of voters together. Inherently, you have people inside that group that disagree with each other, or they want you to emphasize one thing over the other.”

There’s not been any public polling this gubernatorial election season that shows how voters feel about the Taylor case as it relates to the candidates and policing. But, a November 2021 CityView poll conducted for The Courier Journal and USA Today showed almost 70% of 500 Louisville respondents opposed ‘defunding the police’ — but almost half supported cutting police budgets to increase social services.

The same poll also found that just over half of respondents thought the protests that followed Taylor’s death hurt the city — a figure that was driven largely by white respondents.

Overall, Tillery anticipated the case may not dull Cameron’s shine for Kentucky voters.

“Many purple state elections, particularly Georgia in 2020, flipped precisely because young, white voters and suburban, college educated voters were really sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movements claims,” he said. “I don’t think Kentucky is a purple state; I don’t think it is has those kinds of white groups. So I don’t think that that’s going to trouble him very much, and then you add to that the complete ineptitude of the Democratic Party around messaging on racial justice issues nationally.”

State Rep. Keturah Herron, a Louisville Democrat who helped organize bans on no-knock search warrants prior to taking office, said the Taylor case is a part of the overall analysis voters should make of Cameron, along with his stances on LGBTQ issues, abortion access and policing.

“Like every big issue that we have in our community and our nation, you have to remind people about the consequences and remind people about what things have happened. It’s not anything different in this case,” Herron said. “I think that when you look back at what was happening in 2020, not only around Breonna Taylor but then when you think about COVID, and all of the other issues that we had in the city, a lot of people get fatigued on just issues, right?

“And so, it is our role as community members, as elected officials, as public servants to get out and talk to people about what has happened in the past, what the vision for the future is, and lay out to them why elections matter.”