Another matter: the Breonna Taylor verdict

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The Highlands of Scotland are a world away from skyscrapers and suburban sprawl. But still some people think the region has too many markers of human influence. We meet the rewilders who want to return the landscape to its pre settled state. And at one point, the German startup incubator Rocket Internet looked like it was really going to lift off. But not for very long. We look into why the firm voted yesterday to pull itself off the stock market, leaving disappointed investors on the launchpad. But first.

Breonna Taylor.

Breonna Taylor.

Breonna Taylor. Today, America wakes up from another night of protests over the killing of Breonna Taylor. In March, the 26 year old black woman was shot in her Louisville, Kentucky home by police officers during a botched drug raid. 100 nights of protests followed. On Wednesday. A grand jury declined to bring murder charges against the officers involved.

According to Kentucky law, the use of force by Mattingly and Cosgrove was justified to protect themselves. This justification bars us from pursuing criminal charges in Ms. Breonna Taylor's death.

The decision was met with outrage and grief.

This is ridiculous. This is beyond ridiculous. Y' all murdered Breonna Taylor.

I'm mad. That's right.

Kentucky's attorney general called for calm mob.

Justice is not justice. Justice sought by violence is not justice.

Officials extended a curfew through the weekend, and the city braced for more unrest.

Activists raged against the decision.

Chanting Taylor's name, they marched for hours through Kentucky's largest city. Under Kentucky state law, this is an unlawful assembly.

After Wednesday's mostly peaceful protests, more gunfire. Right there.

Right there.

Officer down. Right there.

Officer down. Two Louisville police officers were shot, but survived. Breonna Taylor.

Breonna Taylor.

The demonstrations have also spread to other cities. New York, Chicago, Portland, Milwaukee, Oakland. Like George Floyd's, Breonna Taylor's name has become a rallying cry against police brutality and unaccountability. But will the outrage over the verdict lead to meaningful reforms?

I think the reason Breonna Taylor's case has struck such a nerve is because the circumstances were so egregious, so tragic.

John Fasman is our Washington correspondent.

She was a 26 year old medical technician who was living with her boyfriend. The police executed a no knock warrant on her apartment. That is 11 of 12 witnesses interviewed said that the police did not announce themselves before they kicked in her door, even though the warrant said they had to identify themselves. Her boyfriend thought that they were being attacked by criminals and he fired his gun. The police then fired really quite recklessly, killing her, shooting into the nearby apartment. And the person they were looking for was her ex boyfriend who didn't even live there. So in George Floyd's death, we saw just a callous indifference to human life. And we saw that very visually. We don't have body cam footage of this incident, but it seems to reflect the same sort of shoddy police work and indifference to human life that you saw in the case of George Floyd.

And so what is it the grand jury said about this then?

The grand jury declined to bring murder charges against the three officers involved in her death. The only charges that were brought were three counts of wanton endangerment against the officer who fired into the apartment next to Ms. Taylor. So I think that compounded the anger of a lot of demonstrators, a lot of people. The idea that nobody was punished for killing someone, but someone was punished for shooting into the apartment next to the person who was killed.

And obviously that's led to protests in Louisville and elsewhere. But I mean, beyond those, what's been the reaction to the decision?

Well, it's played out in the presidential campaign more or less as you would expect it to. Vice President Biden came out and said that Americans must continue to say Breonna Taylor's name. He also expressed condolences to the families of the two police officers who were shot. And he condemned the violence amid the protests that followed Ms. Taylor's death. My heart goes out to Breonna Taylor's mom. The last thing she needs is to see violence in the streets. So protest peacefully. No violence. Donald Trump called the decision not to indict any of the police officers brilliant. Can you comment now? I assume you've been briefed on the charges in the brief. Well, I thought it was really brilliant. Kentucky. And heaped praise on Kentucky's attorney general. I will be speaking to the governor. I understand he's called up the National.

Guard, which is a good thing.

I think it's a very positive thing. And so it sort of fit into the narrative that is already there, which the Democrats are fairly unified and pushing for police reforms. And Donald Trump is using the images of protests as a way to mount a push for a law and order campaign. Whether that works is unclear. It worked in 68 for Richard Nixon, but Nixon was not the incumbent then. What Donald Trump's law and order message amounts to is, vote for me and I will stop what's happening from happening, even though I'm not stopping it right now. That, to me, just doesn't seem terribly compelling.

And what about your view on the decision itself? What do you make of it?

Murder was always going to be a really tough charge to make stick. Breonna Taylor's boyfriend opened fire first and the police fired back. And I think it would be really hard to bring a charge that essentially said that police can't fire back when someone shoots at them. I think that's just a difficult charge to bring. That doesn't mean that justice was served. Right. According to 11 of the 12 witnesses interviewed, the police did not identify themselves, even though the warrant said they had to. And the target of the warrant was Ms. Taylor's ex boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, who lived 10 miles away. And the police appear to have used bad information to obtain the warrant. They said that they had information from a postal service worker. The post office in Louisville said that there was no such collaboration with the police. I don't know why the officers involved with her death are still in the force, other than the sort of absurdly favorable terms negotiated by police unions across America that make holding individual officers accountable. So justice doesn't necessarily mean that the police officers are charged with murder, but I think they should at least be put off the police force. I think the sort of Carelessness they showed is appalling.

But as you say, the most outstanding feature of this has been shoddy police work. I mean, what other kinds of reforms would you recommend to avoid this kind of situation again?

Well, I think there are a few reforms that can come out of this tragedy. One of them is a broad ban on no knock warrants. Whether that's a national ban or whether that's a critical mass of cities and states taking action on themselves. Louisville banned no knock warrants in the wake of her death. I would love to see the federal government say that the police cannot just kick your door down whenever they feel like it. Another one would be an end qualified immunity. And that is the doctrine sort of made up out of whole cloth by an appellate court that says that police can't be held accountable for their actions unless there was a clear constitutional violation that they should have known about in advance. I think we could restrict the collective bargaining power of police unions to just salary and benefits. We shouldn't let them dictate disciplinary terms that shield individual officers from accountability. I think all of those reforms make a real difference in how police operate in America.

There had been quite a lot of protests going on in Louisville in the lead up to this decision. What do you think will happen now, and how do you think that figures into the wider sense of injustice and unrest throughout America?

I wouldn't be surprised to see sustained demonstrations as we saw in the wake of George Floyd's death. I'm not sure they'll be quite as widespread and lasting, but I expect Breonna Taylor's name to galvanize energy for police reforms in the same way that George Floyd's did.

Yeah, but energy doesn't necessarily mean change.

One thing to bear in mind about the protests that followed George Floyd's death is that they've been successful already in forcing some police reforms. New York State, for instance, repealed laws that kept police disciplinary records secret. Colorado and New Jersey and other states have increased reporting requirements so lawmakers and the public can see if departments have a record of racial bias in how they enforce laws. New York has banned chokeholds. The House has passed a broad bill that would, among other things, ban chokeholds, increase reporting requirements, and force police departments to undertake meaningful reforms if they want to get federal grants. That's not going to pass the Senate, but I think if the Democrats win the White House and the Senate in November, you'll see that pass in January.

And you reckon those reforms really get to the heart of the systemic problems here?

America is really in a different place when it comes to police reforms and how it thinks about policing than than it was a year ago. I think that is credit to the protesters who have taken to the streets and stayed on the streets after George Floyd's death. And for the reason that protests have forced some real reforms. I wouldn't be surprised to see them last a good long while after this decision too.

John, thank you very much for joining us.

Jason, Always good to talk to you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, subscribe to the Economist to find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer. For many, the Highlands of northern Scotland, with open mountainous moorland roamed by sheep and deer, is a place of breathtaking beauty. Others see in those stark vistas a troubling modernity. Rewilders, as they're known, want a return to the landscape of millennia past by replanting forests, removing fencing and reintroducing long departed predators. The movement was once just a few lonely voices, but now it's growing louder.

Being up in the Highlands of Scotland is quite incredible.

Susanna Savage writes for the Economist and has been visiting the region.

There's these vast swathes of open moorland because they're so open, there's this huge amount of wind blowing past you and then you walk down into the valley where there'll be these massive lochs or lakes, as we'd say in England, which are incredibly beautiful, although very cold. I went for a dip and it was freezing. You feel really like you're in the middle of a wilderness or in the middle of nature. There's birds tweeting and singing. So this is how we sort of have come to see Scotland, as this bare moorland, which is a very iconic landscape. But more and more of it is being given over to rewilding.

And what does rewilding mean in a Scottish context?

In a Scottish context, it largely means reforestation. So more than 5,000 years ago, I think, Scotland was covered in woodland. And over time this has declined, partly because of weather, but a lot to do with human intervention. And that sort of increased over the years as sheep were introduced and as estates were bought up for shooting and hunting, introducing not only sheep, but deer, which ate a lot of the sapling trees. So rewilding in the Scottish context means returning that woodland and removing the deer and the sheep in order to do so. And it's meant to be done in a very sort of natural way. So that means no fences. And another part of this is reintroducing predators like bears, wolves and lynx that most people argue were once in Scotland.

So who is it that's advocating for rewilding?

It's generally conservationists, but more and more, some of the landowners are advocating for this. Particularly, interestingly, Scandinavian or foreign landowners who've bought up land in Scotland. People like Anders Poulfsen, who owns Asos, who's become Scotland's largest landowner. I met Tom MacDonell, who's actually the land manager of all the land owned by Anders Paulsen. Tom believes the need for fencing is a signal that ecosystems are out of balance.

If I was a farmer and had sheep or whatever, it would be absolutely the right thing to do. But this is not supposed to be an agricultural environment. This is supposed to be a wild, natural place. We have to reset the habitat that's lost out, the natural habitat is lost out in the intervening years, and it's just a rebalance.

And you mentioned also reintroducing predatory species like lynx and so on. How realistic a proposition is that?

Mr. MacDonald and others I spoke to were quite enthusiastic about this, and they really don't rule out introducing predatory species. But I think they recognise maybe a lot of people in Scotland are not ready for this yet.

Nature's smarter than us, and the agricultural movement in the UK has probably got too strong an influence. But there's other ways of making food, and we're not suggesting that we want all their livestock to be eaten by wolves, but there's wolves in Holland now. They're everywhere.

So it's conservationists in part, and rich landowners and the like in part. Is there anybody else who's really behind this?

I think the rich landowners are often would consider themselves conservationists. But, yeah, some of the other less rich landowners are also moving into this, particularly those of a younger generation, although they're quite interested in making money from it. So part of that would be increasing tourism. A lot of people think that if you bring back these predatory species, that will bring tourists in, as well as making the land more beautiful in their eyes. But some people think that rewilding also goes hand in hand with a burgeoning carbon market, which is this idea that you plant trees and then sell the offset carbon from those trees to companies who are looking to be carbon neutral.

So those are the people who are for it and the reasons why. Who's against it?

The resistance is pretty strong. Some landowners are just against this because they're attached to traditional ways of life, like deer stalking. So cutting deer numbers and reintroducing predators rankles Landowners who make their living from gain sports and who just see that as a traditional way of life that they don't want to give up. But there's also resistance among local people employed in that, not just the sort of large landowners and also among hill farmers who graze their sheep on these mountains. So this is the library or the drawing room?

No, this is the drawing room.

This is the drawing room, which is.

Sort of a plate for polite society.

One of the landowners I met was Jamie Williamson, who owns Alvey Estate, which, among other things, derives quite a lot of its income from gamesports. It was quite an experience meeting him because it's this very grand house. We sat down in his drawing room and he also gave me a tour of the library. And in the library there are portraits of his ancestors, because Alvy's been in his family for 100 years. And there were also some fairly impressive deer antlers on the wall. It's set in some very beautiful grounds as well. There's a small lake in front of the house. The estate, which is 13,000 acres, also has cattle and sheep farming and commercial forestry and a caravan park for tourists. Mr. Williamson was telling me how he doesn't think that just because something was a certain way thousands of years ago, that it's necessarily right for it to be like that now. He believes that too much tourism would actually threaten Scottish wildlife and the culture as well as the livelihoods of working and living there.

If you're farming tourists, just the same as if you can have too many sheep or cattle, you can over graze.

And damage the land.

If you put too many tourists in a rural area, they come for seclusion, exclusivity, wildlife and a wilderness experience and recreation. Put too many people in them, they lose the seclusion, they lose exclusivity, they lose a lot of the wildlife and they lose the wilderness experience. And so do you get the sense that this argument really is about livelihoods and the like, or is it more of an emotionally laden fight here?

So I think many of the arguments are to do with economics and livelihoods, but really it's an emotional fight. I don't think that predators like lynx are likely to be reintroduced to Scotland anytime soon. There's just no desire for that, really, among so many people. I think that if some of the estates that have gone in for rewilding can show that it can be profitable, that would be a game changer and maybe government incentives will come into that. In terms of other people, though, I think they're just really emotionally attached to how they think the land should be or their right to decide how their land should be used and to keep their way of life. That said, meeting people on both sides, I feel like there's definitely some middle ground that could be found. Jamie Williamson, for example, is keen to tackle climate change. He's definitely not against that. He wants to build wind turbines on his land, but he is resistant to the idea that the Scottish countryside should be turned into a pretty picture or a museum. And Tom MacDonell on the other side of that, doesn't actually want to see deer stalking obliterated, just changed. So potentially they can work it out and make this work for everyone. But rewilding is definitely going to carry on.

Susanna, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Jason.

For most companies, making it on to a stock exchange in New York, London or Hong Kong is a mark of success. But the German tech firm Rocket Internet this week went the other direction. It delisted, taking its shares off public markets in Frankfurt and Luxembourg, angering many in the process.

Rocket Internet used to be a German startup incubator. That's how they listed themselves on the Frankfurt and Luxembourg stock exchanges.

Wendelin von Bredo is our European business and finance correspondent and it's based in Berlin.

Rocket Internet was founded by three brothers. Their last name is Sambert and initially they had huge successes with companies such as Delivery Hero, that's an online food delivery service, Zalando, an online fashion retailer, Hum24, that's an online furniture business, and others. So those online businesses made them big and in a way, one of the few German Internet successes.

And so why are they delisting then?

Well, they listed in 2014 at a relatively high price at €42.50 and the share price almost immediately lost value and it's never really recovered. The problem was that in a way they had their best idea, their greatest successes before they went public. But once they were listed on the stock exchange, they didn't really have those bold, innovative ideas or they didn't pick up these startups that made them so special. So it's almost as if they ran out of path as soon as they were listed on the stock exchange.

But even still, successes or no, delisting is not the usual path for these kinds of companies.

It is not. Well, delisting can make sense if, as actually the Samwer brothers are saying, they are getting access to plenty of capital anyway, they don't need the public market and they are desiring the freedom of not having to do all the reporting. And all the technocratic stuff that comes with a stock market listing. However, the way they go about it is unusual, and that's what's upsetting minority shareholders. What they're doing is they're using company money in two rounds of share buybacks. The first round has already happened. That happened until the 15th of September, and it pushed the Samwell Brothers stake to beyond 50%. So they now own more than 50% of the company. They now basically want to again use company cash, about 1 billion euros, to. To buy out the rest of the shareholders, but they're offering them a miserly price. So an investor who invested in the original IPO would lose more than half of his or her investment. And I talked to a shareholder activist called Michael Kunerd, who is the spokesman for the association of the Protection of Capital Investors, and he said what the Summers are doing is totally legal and totally immoral.

Is there anything that those shareholders can do about it?

Of course they cannot sell, but some shareholders don't have the mandate to invest in unlisted companies, so they can. But then, of course, there are private individuals who could say, okay, well, we're just holding on to our shares. And I think some are intending to do so. But then they are completely at the mercy of the Samware brothers because they now own more than 50% of the company, and they can do basically what they like with what's essentially their company. But I do think some will hold out and not sell now because they consider it such a low price.

And so what does this episode tell you more broadly about the sort of startup sector in Germany?

Well, you know, famously, Germany doesn't have much of an Internet economy, or certainly not a very vibrant one. And there was a lot of hope that a successful launch of the Internet's rockets could have changed that. And a lot of really good people, people used to work for them, but many have left just because they've been so disappointed by what they thought was an exciting German incubator of exciting companies. And they basically are now almost like a fund manager. They've started to invest in real estate in Berlin. They've only made really quite small investments in recent years. So it's not a complete crash because the company is anything but bankrupt, but it's. It's just a huge disappointment, I'd say.

Thanks very much for your time, Vendolin.

You're very welcome, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here on Monday.