Yolanda Irving and Kenya Walton are two Black mothers in Raleigh, whose homes were wrongfully raided by a Raleigh Police SWAT Team in 2020. The raid was based on a bad address on a warrant, stemming from a corrupt cop and a corrupt informant.
The mothers’ children were terrified and held at gunpoint, as police searched for contraband that did not exist. The case is a classic example of the harms of “No Knock” warrants of the type that led to Breonna Taylor’s murder.
Emancipate NC attorneys Ian Mance and Elizabeth Simpson represent Yolanda and Kenya, along with co-counsel Abe Rubert-Schewel, Emily Gladden, and Michael Littlejohn.
Yesterday, the legal team petitioned to release the body camera footage of the SWAT raid–but Judge Bryan Collins from Wake County Superior Court refused to make the footage of the bad raid public, even as he released footage from the recent police murder of Daniel Turcios.
ABC 11 reported:
When Raleigh police officers first strapped on body cameras back in 2018, community activists celebrated the move as a win for transparency and police accountability. But there was mixed reaction Wednesday to the result of the city’s latest high-profile body camera hearing. Two different cases. Two different results. And RPD’s argument in each case is not sitting well with some.
Raleigh Police successfully blocked the public release of RPD bodycam footage of the wrongful SWAT-team-style raid first reported Tuesday night by ABC11.
“They didn’t find anything in my home. They didn’t find no money. No drugs. No nothing. I never got an apology,” said Yolanda Irving, a mother and Wake school bus driver, who tearfully recalled the moments the department’s Selective Enforcement Unit raided her east Raleigh home; pointing rifles and ransacking the house — only to find out more than an hour later that the search warrant had the wrong address.
Irving and her next-door neighbor Kenya Walton, whose teenage son was chased and handcuffed in the wrongful raid, wanted the bodycam footage released.
Dawn Blagrove, a criminal justice reform activist and executive director of Emancipate NC, said, “These two rulings are contradictory. They make no sense.”
She was pleased the Turcios videos are going public. But she said the release of the wrongful raid video would have helped the public better understand the breakdown in trust between so many people of color and the police.
“Because if we saw more of these kinds of mistakes from law enforcement, and there was more light shined on that, maybe we wouldn’t have to watch so many videos of fathers being murdered by law enforcement,” said Blagrove.
Watch the video accompanying the ABC news story.
The case was also covered by Virginia Bridges from the News and Observer.
The full hearing can be viewed here.