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The shooting of Breonna Taylor, which happened on March 13 but is only now getting national attention, highlights once again the deadly recklessness of “dynamic entry” police raids. The very tactics that police use to minimize violence, aimed at discombobulating their targets and catching them off guard in the hope of discouraging resistance, predictably lead to fatal misunderstandings. These tactics are especially inappropriate when police enter homes in service of the war on drugs, as they did in this case.

Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT and aspiring nurse with no criminal history, was killed  by plainclothes Louisville police officers who knocked in the door of her apartment with a battering ram shortly before 1 a.m. At the time, Taylor was in bed with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Walker’s lawyer says he fired once at the armed intruders, not realizing they were police officers. One officer was struck in the leg. The cops responded with a hail of bullets—at least 20 shots, according to lawyers representing Taylor’s mother. Taylor was hit at least eight times.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that police were targeting two men they suspected of selling drugs at a house more than 10 miles away—one of whom, Jamarcus Glover, was arrested that same night. The no-knock search warrant for Taylor’s apartment was based on a package that Glover had delivered there. The Courier-Journal says police believed that Glover, who had dated Taylor, “used her home to receive mail, keep drugs or stash money earned from the sale of drugs.” No drugs were found in the apartment.

Although the search warrant authorized police to enter without announcing themselves, the Louisville Metro Police Department said the officers “knocked on the door several times and announced their presence as police who were there with a search warrant.” As Zuri Davis notes, four neighbors contradicted that claim. But even if the official account is accurate, it is completely plausible that Walker and Taylor, who were asleep in bed in the middle of the night, did not hear or comprehend those warnings. Walker, who has been charged with the attempted murder of a police officer, reportedly called 911 and Taylor’s mother, saying someone was breaking into the apartment.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because police across the country create this sort of dangerous situation again and again.

Even if the no-knock Houston drug raid that killed Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Douglas last year had not been based on a fraudulent search warrant affidavit, the tactics that police used would have led to the same deadly outcome. According to Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, the cops—who, like the officers who killed Taylor, were not wearing body cameras—”announced themselves as Houston police officers while simultaneously breaching the front door.” One of the officers immediately used a shotgun to kill the couple’s dog, prompting Tuttle to fire at the intruders with his revolver. As in the Taylor case, the officers responded with overwhelming force, shooting Tuttle at least eight times and Nicholas at least twice. Four officers were wounded during the exchange of fire.

The raid was conducted around 5 p.m., but lawyers representing Nicholas’ family say she and Tuttle were taking “an afternoon nap” in their bedroom at the time. As with Walker, it is plausible that Tuttle—who, it turned out, was not actually a heroin dealer—did not realize the men who burst into his house and fired the first shot were police officers.

Narcotics officers executing search warrants “don’t show up in uniform,” Acevedo said, “but they do show up with plenty of gear that identifies them as police officers, including patrol officers that are out in front of the house.” But patrol officers outside the house do not give people inside the house notice that the men breaching their door and killing their dog are cops, and it’s not clear what other “gear” Acevedo had in mind. And since the plainclothes officers who burst into the house did so without warning, “announcing” themselves at the same moment they were breaking down the door, it would not be surprising if Tuttle missed that announcement and any other clues to their identity.

After the raid, Acevedo announced that narcotics officers would henceforth use no-knock warrants only in extraordinary circumstances and with approval from his office. But the distinction between a no-knock warrant and a knock-and-announce warrant makes little practical difference when a home’s residents are asleep and/or police breach the door immediately after announcing themselves.

Corey Maye, the Mississippi man who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death after he shot a police officer during a 2001 drug raid, always maintained that he thought he was protecting himself and his 18-month-old daughter from violent criminals. His death sentence eventually was reduced to life in prison, then to 10 years, a sentence he completed in 2011. The case, which received national attention thanks to the tireless investigative work of my former Reason colleague Radley Balko, should have been a lesson for police departments throughout the country.

In 2014, a Texas grand jury declined to indict Henry Magee, a marijuana grower who shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy who burst into his home in the early morning to execute a search warrant. “This was a terrible tragedy that a deputy sheriff was killed, but Hank Magee believed that he and his pregnant girlfriend were being robbed,” Magee’s lawyer told the Associated Press. “He did what a lot of people would have done. He defended himself and his girlfriend and his home.”

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. At this point, it’s amazing that so many police departments don’t.

After a middle-of-night Georgia drug raid that gravely injured a toddler in 2014, a local grand jury offered some advice that police should have taken to heart. “Some of what contributed to this tragedy can be attributed to well-intentioned people getting in too big a hurry, and not slowing down and taking enough time to consider the possible consequences of their actions,” the jurors said. “While no person surely intended any harm to a young child, quite simply put there should be no such thing as an ’emergency’ in drug investigations.”

As long as the government insists on trying to forcibly prevent people from consuming arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants, violence is inevitable, and it will sometimes be lethal. But drug warriors can reduce that risk by weighing the benefits of any given operation (usually negligible, even from the perspective of committed prohibitionists) against the danger that people will die for no good reason.

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Attorneys for the family of Breonna Taylor, a woman killed by the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD), say Taylor is dead because of police carelessness. Officers with the LMPD killed Taylor during a no-knock raid, during which they also arrested her boyfriend for trying to defend the couple. After two months of internal investigation by the LMPD, the circumstances around Taylor’s death will now be reviewed by the federal government.

According to a press conference held by attorney Brian Crump, on March 13 Taylor was home asleep with boyfriend Kenneth Walker when LMPD served a no-knock narcotics raid on their home. Crump says the officers used a battering ram to break down the door and that the couple called 911 believing they were victims of a home invasion.

Walker, who Crump said is a registered gun owner, shot in the direction of the officers, hitting Officer Jon Mattingly in the leg. Police shot back. Taylor was shot eight times and died. Crump said that the LMPD asked Taylor’s mother soon after the shooting if she and Walker were having issues, which he believes means that the department wanted to pin Taylor’s death on Walker. To complicate matters further, in an affidavit filed immediately after the raid, the LMPD referred to Taylor as the shooter.

Walker was arrested and indicted for felonious assault and the attempted murder of a police officer. The indictment accused Walker of “manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life when he wantonly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death.”

In response to a request for comment, LMPD referred back to a press conference held on March 13, hours after Taylor was killed. In that press conference, the LMPD says that around 12:40 a.m., members of the Criminal Interdiction Division “knocked on the door several times and announced their presence as police who were there for the search warrant.” The officers then forced entry and were met by Walker’s gunfire. Mattingly was injured and the other officers returned fire. The officers were placed on administrative leave while the LMPD conducted an internal review.

Crump said the officers did not attempt to identify themselves peacefully or give the couple time to respond. At least four neighbors told lawyers that LMPD officers never knocked or identified themselves before the exchange of gunfire. The Criminal Interdiction Division, which investigates “violent street gangs, armed career criminals as well as criminal enterprises involving gang members,” is not issued body-worn cameras, and so LMPD does not have video footage of the incident.

According to the search warrant obtained by Reason, LMPD Detective Joshua Jaynes told a court he had probable cause to believe that Walker and a man named Jamarcus Glover were supplying drugs to a “trap house” approximately 10 miles, or 20 minutes, away from Taylor’s apartment. Taylor’s apartment was named on the warrant because Glover was seen picking up a package from the residence. A U.S. Postal Inspector confirmed that Glover occasionally received mail at Taylor’s apartment.

Crump refuted this, saying Glover only received one package from Taylor’s apartment in January. Sam Aguiar, the local lawyer for Taylor’s family, also questioned why the LMPD didn’t pull Glover over when they observed him receiving the package, noting that Glover is pulled over at least once a month.

At the end of the warrant, Jaynes requested a no-knock raid on Taylor’s apartment.

“[Jaynes] is requesting a No-Knock entry to the premises due to the nature of how these drug traffickers operate,” the warrant states, arguing, “These drug traffickers have a history of attempting to destroy evidence, have cameras on the location that compromise Detectives once an approach to the dwelling is made, and [have a] history of fleeing from law enforcement.”

Despite video evidence to support the police version of events, the LMPD has painted Walker as an attempted cop killer. Upon learning that a judge had granted him home incarceration in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the River City Fraternal Order of Police released a statement condemning the decision.

“Just one week ago, this man violently attacked our officers, and was charged with attempted murder after shooting a sergeant! Not only is he a threat to the men and women of law enforcement, but he also poses a significant danger to the community we protect!” they wrote.

After receiving national attention in the past week, however, both Taylor and Walker may very well be vindicated. Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer and LMPD Chief Steve Conrad announced on Thursday that they asked the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky to review the internal investigation of Taylor’s death.

The dispute over whether police adequately identified themselves have led critics of police shootings to draw comparisons between Taylor’s death and that death of Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth, Texas, last October. Body-worn camera footage showed now-former officer Aaron Dean conducting a welfare search at Jefferson’s home at the request of a neighbor. Dean, who neighbors say did not identify himself, saw Jefferson through her window, shouted at her to put her hands up, and then shot her fatally. Dean has since been indicted for murder.

Regardless of whether police announced themselves before breaking down the couple’s door, Taylor is yet another example of how aggressive, no-knock SWAT raids can end in tragedy. 

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Contrary to what you may have heard, Los Angeles County is not closing for another three months.

The original message from the county’s public health director Barbara Ferrer—and from the media that covered it—caused an uproar. But the actual directive moves L.A. into stage two of its reopening plan, permitting residents to resume outdoor activities. Beaches are no longer off limits, nor are golf courses, tennis courts, or hiking trails. It allows all retail businesses except those in indoor malls to reopen for delivery or pickup. Manufacturing and logistics sector businesses deemed nonessential are permitted to restart, so long as social distancing guidelines are put in place. The county will continue to lift restrictions as they observe downward trends in the area’s COVID-19 outbreak.

That’s a start. But it still tells Angelanos not to resume socializing with friends outside their immediate household.

Meanwhile, D.C.’s shutdown remains as restrictive as ever, and it’s currently scheduled to stay that way through June 8. The sole place Mayor Muriel Bowser is loosening the rules is a pilot program allowing select retail establishments to restart for curbside and front-door pickup.

Cases in D.C. have decreased 4 percent over the last 14 days, and the curve has plateaued. As of yesterday, 25 percent of ICU beds were empty and the hospital system has yet to experience a ruinous patient influx.

“While we are making significant progress based on the data and metrics that we are following closely, we are not ready to begin a phased reopening of the District,” Bowser said at a Wednesday town hall. She did note that she can revise the order at any time, if the data start trending in the right direction.

After two months of some form of government-enforced isolation, when will leaders be ready? The chief purpose of the lockdown was to “flatten the curve”—that is, to squash the virus’s projected spread from a mountainous upward trajectory into a more docile hill, saving hospitals from a cataclysmic influx of patients. Lost in the recent conversation is that, by and large, the U.S. has successfully flattened the curve.

Also lost in the discussion: A grand total of one state—the sparsely populated North Dakota—has sufficiently met the Trump administration’s guidelines for beginning a phased reopening.

Indeed, 30 of the 31 states that have begun some sort of partial comeback are doing so against the federal guidelines, which came from a president eager to restart the economy. Even so, reopeners deemed high-risk like Florida and Georgia have yet to experience an uptick in cases, though many experts were sure they would. That casts the debate into an even more ambiguous light, as the two respective sides—economic vitality vs. public health—claim to have the higher ground.

But a middle ground is possible. We can tread lightly amid health uncertainties while trying to address the enormous economic and social costs of forbidding people from seeing friends and family for months on end.

“The full lockdown made sense weeks ago,” wrote Marty Makary, a surgeon and a professor of health policy at the Johns Hopkins, in a New York Times op-ed this week. “But the situation is changing, and more data on the virus are now available to inform our next steps. The choice before us isn’t to fully lock down or to totally reopen. Many argue as though those are the only options.”

Indeed, failing to reckon with the public health implications of endless lockdowns is its own form of recklessness. Much has been made about the obvious economic implications, which are devastating. Largely absent from the conversation are the equally obvious social costs. A poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation concluded that nearly half of American adults feel their mental health is suffering amid the pandemic and the associated isolation. Human beings have basic needs, and not everyone lives with a family or partner. Admonishments to just watch Netflix don’t really cut it anymore.

A vaccine isn’t expected until 2021 at the earliest. For many, the lockdowns are already coming to an end whether governments like it or not. Effective policy making will have to take that restlessness into account, along with all the trade-offs that are fueling it. An endless holding pattern is not an effective strategy.

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“About 30 percent of people in Stockholm have reached a level of immunity,” Sweden’s ambassador to the U.S. told NPR on April 26. “We could reach herd immunity [to the coronavirus] in the capital as early as next month.”

The comment turns out to have been a bit hasty: The report on the city’s infection rate that the ambassador seems to have been referencing had already been withdrawn without explanation four days earlier. But the larger issue of herd immunity remains important.

Herd immunity is the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results if a sufficiently high proportion of a population is immune to the illness. Some people are still susceptible, but they are surrounded by immune indviduals, who serve as a barrier preventing the microbes from reaching them. You can achieve this through either mass infection or mass vaccination.

Until there is an effective COVID-19 vaccine, the only way to achieve herd immunity would be to allow the microbe to infect enough people to form that barrier protecting the susceptible. The breadth of the barrier required to achieve herd immunity depends in large part on just how contagious a specific disease is. For example: In a susceptible, unvaccinated population, each measles carrier will infect an estimated 12 to 18 other people. In the nomenclature of epidemiology, the basic reproduction number or R0 (“R naught”) of measles is 12 to 18.

The classical formula for calculating a herd immunity threshold is 1—1/R0. With measles, that means 1—1/18, or a threshold of 94 percent. In general, the higher the R0, the higher the threshold required for achieving herd immunity. Other important factors in calculating herd immunity thresholds include the number of social interactions and their durations, innate differences in individual immune responses, and divergent exposures to the infectious microbe.

While there is still some debate about this, the R0 of the COVID-19 coronavirus without interventions is generally estimated to be between 2.2 and 2.7. If the R0 is below 1, that means the outbreak is abating as fewer and fewer people are infected; if it remains above 1, the epidemic is ongoing. The goal of social distancing practices is to stem the epidemic by driving the R0 of the coronavirus below 1.

Of course, achieving herd immunity would also eventually result in an R0 that falls below 1 and a declining number of infections.

Most the evidence so far suggests that people who recover from a COVID-19 coronavirus infection do, at least for a time, develop immunity to the microbe. If that’s true, what is the disease-induced herd immunity threshold for the COVID-19 coronavirus? Various epidemiologists offer different answers, depending upon their estimates for the disease’s R0 and other variables, but most have converged on a threshold at around 60 to 70 percent.

More recently, some researchers have suggested that this threshold may be too high. In a new preprint, three mathematicians from Sweden and the United Kingdom, using an R0 of 2.5, calculate a reduction in the herd immunity threshold from 60 percent to 43 percent by incorporating some assumptions with respect to populations’ social activity levels and age structures.

A couple of new reports speculatively lower the possible herd immunity threshold for the coronavirus to just 10 to 20 percent of the population. This conjecture depends chiefly on assumptions about just how susceptible and connected members of the herd are. In their preprint, a team of European epidemiologists led by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine mathematical bioscientist Gabriela Gomes explains how this might work.

If highly susceptible herd members become infected and thus immune first, the preprint says, their subsequent interactions with the still-uninfected will not result in additional cases. Basically, the virus stymies itself by disproportionately removing those most useful to it from contributing to its future transmission. In addition, if herd members are very loosely connected and interact with one another rarely, the virus will have a much harder time jumping to its next victims. Sustained social distancing aimed at flattening the curve of coronavirus infections and cases mimics this effect.

Adopting insights from the Gomes article, the British statistician Nic Lewis suggests that Stockholm County in Sweden may indeed have already achieved herd immunity. But if formerly standoffish herd members start frequently hanging out together in, say, bars, restaurants, theaters and baseball games, the percent of the population needed to achieve herd immunity will of course rise.

There are no solid estimates for the percentage of the U.S. population that has already been infected by the coronavirus, but Youyang Gu and his team at COVID19-Projections estimate that right now the number is between 2.2 to 4.7 percent. That would mean that somewhere between 7.3 and 15.5 million Americans have been infected. A similar result emerges from a very rough calculation that multiplies the number of confirmed cases at 1.4 million by a 10-fold factor of undiagnosed cases and infections. (The 10-fold factor is derived from data recently reported by Indiana University researchers.)

The upshot: The U.S. as a whole is not yet close to achieving even the speculatively low estimate of the herd immunity threshold.

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