About 200 people turned out Thursday morning in Oakland to respond to the verdict against police who killed Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, in March.
The rally started at about 11 a.m. in front of a mural dedicated to Taylor at 15th Street and Broadway in Oakland, following the verdict Wednesday that indicted one of three officers only on wanton endangerment for shooting into the walls of neighboring apartments.
Taylor was killed when police entered her home on a no-knock search warrant and Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker shot and hit an officer, according to Kentucky officials.
State officials said police knocked and that Walker admitted hearing pounding at the door, but no one say they were police. Police then entered the apartment where Taylor was sleeping.
"There's a war being raged on our lives," Cat Brooks with the group Anti Police-Terror Project said at the rally. "We have come to say enough is enough is enough."
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Organizers said Taylor was murdered and yet her neighbors' walls got more justice than she did.
The felony indictment was handed down against Detective Brett Hankison, now a former detective with the Louisville Metro Police Department.
Organizers said what happened to Taylor is a symptom of a paradigm in which Black women and girls are not respected or protected by the government or government officials.
They said the names of Black women and girls are forgotten and their stories not told.
“You know our lives matter," said Ayodele Nzinga with The Lower Bottom Playaz, a theater group in Oakland.
“There's a war going on," she said. "There's a war on Black bodies."
Dominique Walker with Moms 4 Housing, which took over a vacant West Oakland home late last year to demand that "housing is a human right" said, "If we didn't live in a police state, I would be surprised by the verdict."
"Let's get ready for the war we are in," she said.
