We have already covered the Lexington-Fayette Urban-County Council’s ban on no-knock warrants in the city, and needn’t go into it further here. Most of our source material came from the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Also on the Herald-Leader website was a ‘national’ story on it, by the Associated Press:

Kentucky’s second-largest city bans ‘no-knock’ warrants

The Associated Press | June 26, 2021 | 3:57 PM

Kentucky’s second-largest city has joined Breonna Taylor’s hometown in banning the use of “no-knock” warrants.

The AP noted in its story that the Herald-Leader was their source, so that was good. And there’s really nothing in the story that the Herald-Leader story did not include, with the exception of this one paragraph:

Last year, the Metro Council in Louisville, Kentucky, voted to ban the controversial warrants, which permit officers to enter a home or residence without knocking. Taylor — a Louisville emergency medical technician studying to become a nurse — was fatally shot by police as officers burst into her home while conducting a narcotics investigation. No drugs were found at her home.

Now, if the AP story was your only source if information on the incident, you could be forgiven if you read that paragraph and thought that the Louisville Metro Police Department just sent in goons with guns blazing. That isn’t the case. Kenneth Walker, Miss Taylor’s boyfriend, was in the apartment, claimed that he thought the entering police officers were intruders breaking in, and he fired a shot at the police first! The LMPD officers didn’t enter with guns blazing; they returned fire!

Some people have claimed that the no knock warrant should never have been issued. Some have claimed that Miss Taylor, the ex-girlfriend of Jamarcus Glover, a known drug dealer, was an innocent victim. I don’t think so.

The LMPD investigation’s primary targets were Jamarcus Glover and Adrian Walker (not related to Kenneth Walker), who were suspected of selling controlled substances from a drug house approximately 10 miles (16 km) away. Glover had cohabited with Taylor and said the police had pressured him to move out of Taylor’s residence for unspecified reasons. Glover and Taylor had been in an on-off relationship that started in 2016 and lasted until February 2020, when Taylor committed to Kenneth Walker.

In December 2016, Fernandez Bowman was found dead in a car rented by Taylor and used by Glover. He had been shot eight times. Glover had used Taylor’s address and phone number for various purposes, including bank statements.

But, regardless of your feelings on the incident, one thing is certain: the Associated Press story is deliberately misleading and inflammatory.

All that the AP would have to have done is insert four small words into that one sentence:

“Taylor — a Louisville emergency medical technician studying to become a nurse — was fatally shot by police as officers returned fire when bursting into her home while conducting a narcotics investigation.”

It was, of course, always possible that those four words, or something similar, had been in the story, and that someone at what my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal removed them, to deliberately slant the story. To check that, I did a search of the entire sentence, in quotation marks, and found it, on the AP news site, exactly as it appeared on the newspaper’s website. No, despite the way out of touch editorial staff of the (sort of) local newspaper, I can’t blame this one on them; this was entirely the AP.

With those four words, the article would have been strictly factual; without them, it was just another slanted hit piece against law enforcement. But no, the credentialed media aren’t biased at all, not at all, and everything they tell us is true.