Although Ms. Taylor had no criminal record and was never the target of an inquiry, Mr. Glover’s frequent run-ins with the police entangled her. She had been interviewed in a murder inquiry, and paid or arranged bail for him and his associates.

When Mr. Glover called from jail after an earlier arrest in January, she told him that his brushes with the law worried her, according to a recording; each said “I love you” before hanging up. A GPS tracker the police placed on his car later showed him making regular trips to her apartment complex, and surveillance photos showed her outside a drug house.

In a series of calls hours after her death, as Mr. Glover tried to make bail, he told another woman that he had left about $14,000 with Ms. Taylor. “Bre been having all my money,” he claimed. The same afternoon, he also told an associate he had left money at Ms. Taylor’s home.

Mr. Aguiar, the lawyer for her family, said that no drugs or cash were found at her apartment after the raid. Thomas B. Wine, the Jefferson County prosecutor, countered that the search was called off once the shooting occurred.

But since Ms. Taylor’s death, what has emerged in bank statements, cellphone records, bail paperwork, audio recordings of police interrogations and other documents is a trail of evidence pointing to a complicated liaison between her and Mr. Glover, dating back to 2016.

Mr. Aguiar said in a statement last week that the police department had gone to “great lengths after Breonna died and this case received national scrutiny to dig up all of her past.”

But the lawyer also apologized to the public for having previously understated the extent of her relationship with the drug dealer, saying he had been unaware of the jailhouse recordings.

Court records show that Mr. Glover was convicted of selling cocaine and spent years in prison, starting in 2008 in his home state of Mississippi, where he was handed a 17-year sentence. In 2014, after moving to Kentucky, he was convicted of a second drug offense. He began dating Ms. Taylor in 2016, according to a statement he gave the police.

That December, a favor he asked of her — renting a car and lending it to him — ensnared her in a murder inquiry. A man was found slumped over the wheel, eight bullets riddling his body. Inside the car were three baggies of drugs and Ms. Taylor’s rental contract, court records show.

Breonna Taylor came from difficult circumstances. Her father was incarcerated for murder. She wanted a different life for herself. But she made a terrible mistake:

“Graduating this year on time is so important to me because I will be the first in my family to accomplish this,” she wrote in her scrapbook during her senior year, next to a photo of herself in a cap and gown. “I want to be the one who finally breaks the cycle of my family’s educational history. I want to be the one to finally make a difference.”

She enrolled at the University of Kentucky and a year later, in 2012, began a banter on Twitter with Mr. Walker, then a student at a university two and a half hours away. He was 20, she was 19. The flirtatious tweets grew into a friendship, and then a romance four years later, according to his account.

“I kept on telling her, I don’t want to be friends no more,” he recalled in an interview. “But I’m a Gemini, and she was also a Gemini. So, you know, some days it was, ‘Yeah let’s, let’s get married and have a kid,’ and another day it’s like, “No, let’s be single and live carefree lives.”

They began dating in the summer of 2016, he said. But a few months later, she started seeing Mr. Glover. For nearly four years — until weeks before her death — she went back and forth between the two men, Mr. Walker told the police.

She had a good boyfriend — Walker — but she could not shake the bad boy, Glover. And that is part of the reason she is dead.

Read the whole thing. Me, I don’t understand why the police, if they wanted Breonna Taylor, couldn’t have simply arrested her outside her apartment. Why did they need to do this dramatic raid? Even if it is found to be legally defensible, in the end, you have to wonder about the judgment of the police department here. But you also have to wonder about the judgment of Breonna Taylor, in continuing her relationship with this dirtbag Glover who just used her, and dragged her into his dirty business.

I bring this all up not to say “Breonna Taylor is responsible for her death” — it seems clear to me that there was a serious flaw in policing here — but to point out a major factor in drawing lessons from what happened to her, from the arc of her short life. What does her death mean?

Here’s where I’m going with this. My father taught my sister and me never to get mouthy with a police officer if we have an encounter, and always to obey them if placed under arrest. This was not part of an “or they will kill you” story; this was rather part of a story that said police are invested with legitimate authority, and even if you are innocent, you should obey them and let the legal system sort it out. I have passed on the same culture to my own children. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, in light of what’s been going on in our society, and I’ve been realizing how grateful I am to my late father for the gift he gave to us kids of moral order.

He was not perfect, and not a saint, but my dad, born to a factory worker and the first in his family to go to college, raised us kids in a modest home where my sister and I absorbed a sense of order naturally. I sometimes write about that much-discussed 1994 piece Robert D. Kaplan wrote in The Atlantic, titled “The Coming Anarchy” — I’m not going to waste one of my free Atlantic stories to link to it, but you can look it up. In it, Kaplan writes of a long journey he took from West African, through Egypt, Turkey, and on to southern Asia. He was trying to figure out the geopolitical future of that part of the world. The thing that has stuck with me through the years since reading it was his comparison of the slums of West Africa to those in Cairo and Istanbul. The difference was not money; everybody was dirt poor. The difference was that the West African poor had no sense of internal order, but the Egyptian and Turkish poor did — this, concluded Kaplan, was the gift of Islam. They had internalized the tenets of the Islamic religion, and conducted themselves according to its teachings.

Now, West Africa is both Islamic and Christian, but one has to wonder to what extent these Abrahamic religions have been internalized by the people within those cultures, and to what extent they are still under the sway of their traditional pagan gods. Islam and Christianity could be a thin veneer over resilient traditional paganism. Note well: I’m making a sociological claim here, not a theological one.

Broadly speaking, the traditional pagan religions of West Africa (which were imported to the New World with the African slaves) hold that the cosmos is fundamentally chaotic. Mankind lives at the mercy of the gods. Reality is controlled by unseen forces. The best a man can do is to keep those forces at bay by propitiating them, or perhaps by controlling them to do his bidding. In a society determined by this kind of pagan cosmology, it can be rational to live by irrationality. If the gods might destroy your field because they are mad at you, then what sense does it make to live by agricultural practices that would bring order to your farm? Ideas have consequences, and so do religious ideas.

My dad was not much of a churchgoer, but he imbued his children with the unquestioned sense that the universe was rational, ordered, and moral. This was our reality, an unseen reality made manifest in the way my dad and mom governed our house, and taught us to regard the world. I think my dad believed too much in moral rationality: he really struggled to deal with the fact that his daughter, who had lived 100 percent by the code he believed in, was struck down by cancer in her forties. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. She had done everything right, and this happened. Some things really are beyond our ability to control.

But my father was more right than wrong. I write a fair amount about how he came from rural poverty, and understood what it was like to have nothing. After World War II, when the GI Bill opened up opportunities for poor and working class men to go to college, he took advantage of that. The self-discipline and (if you want to be fancy) metaphysics he was handed by his parents and their rural Southern culture allowed him to prosper materially. My dad was a Christian, but not a big churchgoer. What he believed in was hard work, self-discipline, and personal honor. In his view, the world rewarded those who lived by that code — and if a poor man who did was mistreated, or a rich man who didn’t prospered, then that was a sign of injustice.

I’ve thought a lot about how my dad rose from poverty, and why people who haven’t risen from poverty are stuck there. This is a big topic, but the point I want to bring up here is tied to the West Africa vs. Cairo and Istanbul story. I’ve written here in the past about a family I know up in my home parish — a white family who would be classified as “the working poor.” When we were living up there, we regularly saw the matriarch of the family, who kept us updated on the travails of her sprawling clan. The stories she would tell — some of which involved drugs and booze — were hard to grasp for middle-class people like my wife and me.

We tried to help them materially on a couple of occasions, but we finally realized that it was futile. These people constantly sabotaged themselves. Here’s the key: it finally became clear to my wife and me that this family lived in a chaotic cosmos. They believed that bad things just happened to them. They had almost no sense of cause and effect. If bad things happened, it was either bad luck, or someone else wishing them ill. The matriarch was a dear woman, a hard-working woman, but she was saddled by a bunch of no-account men, and reckless women who followed their passions wherever they led. Materially, this clan had far more resources than my dad, a child of the Great Depression, ever did. But they lacked a sense of internal order, and a sense that reality was governed by laws — the Tao, if you like.

This was the West Africa vs. Egypt and Turkey story, played out among white Americans in the same parish. I was raised in a lower middle class home, in terms of personal wealth, but my father, our patriarch, was extremely rich in wisdom.

He taught us to stay away from drugs, because they would ruin your life. Alcohol was permitted in his world, but drunkenness was taboo. A man who can’t hold his liquor is shameful, he believed. When I was arrested as a college freshman for drunk driving, the shame of it was what upset him so much. Look at you, with your name in the newspaper, disgracing the family. You were raised better than that. 

He was right: I had been raised better than that. It didn’t happen again.

My father imbued us kids with a strong sense of personal responsibility. Yes, the world is unfair, he would say, but that doesn’t give you the right to “act up,” as he put it. He despised self-pity, and considered it a moral fault. He warned us that keeping bad company would lead to bad things for us. Don’t go along with the crowd, he would say. Do what you know is right, no matter what it costs you. Respect others, and respect yourself. You could pick up the Book of Proverbs, and there you would find the world of my father, pretty much. He was so old-fashioned, and I thank God for the gift of that old-fashioned country man. When I read Clarence Thomas’s great memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, about how his strict grandfather, who raised him, saved him by impressing upon him a rock-solid set of values, I realized that Justice Thomas’s grandfather was a harder-edged version of my own dad.

I go on about this for a reason. What happened to George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and Breonna Taylor would not have surprised a man like my father. Floyd was a career criminal and a drughead. Blake was a violent man too. Taylor’s extended romantic relationship with a career criminal brought her to ruin. All of these cases, regardless of how they are adjudicated in a court of law, would have been seen by my father as examples of what happens to people who refuse to live by the Tao (I mean this in the C.S. Lewis sense of “natural law”), or who entangle themselves with those who refuse to live by the Tao. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis wrote:

The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.

I have a friend, a Catholic convert, who used to be addicted to cocaine. Once he was speeding on his motorcycle, flying high on the drug, when he heard a voice say, “If you want to live, stop this.” (Or something close to that.) He knew it wasn’t a hallucination. He stopped. He found God. He radically changed his life. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he continued on that path, he would die. He had to get rid of his drug friends, and, well, repent in every way. But he was walking the road to death.

Why am I going on and on about all this? Because all of this is part of the worldview of conservatives, a moral orientation toward the world that conditions how many of us interpret these high-profile cases of police violence against black people. When I saw Chris Webber’s moving statement, I wondered if he really does believe that the problem of police violence against black men is solely one of out-of-control police who need to be reigned in by lawmakers. Does he truly not see that this problem is far more morally and culturally complex?

I’m sure he doesn’t. You can’t watch that Chris Webber statement and think that that man is a cynic. Again, he comes across to me as a good man, a moral man. But I think he is a liberal, and that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has taught us a great deal about the differences in moral foundations between liberals and conservatives. I’ll get to that in a second.

Last night, I corresponded with a reader — an academic who is an Evangelical Christian — about all this. He gives me permission to quote his letter below. I brought up in our conversation how much I struggled to understand the worldview of people who regard Floyd, Blake, and Taylor as nothing more than people acted upon, and as not having some moral responsibility for their lives, and how they ended up in these terrible situations. The reader wrote back:

I’m in the same boat. I can’t fathom what other people are thinking. The best explanation I have is that other people are not thinking in legal terms of responsibility/duty and what sorts of duties are conducive to a lawful and peaceful social order.

That led me to talk to the reader about how deeply grateful I am for the gift my father gave me and my late sister — the gift of internal moral order. My dad was a man who placed immense stock in moral authority. He worked in government, as a health inspector, and he had to deal with people all the time who tried to flout the moral order. A couple of times people tried to bribe him to give their facilities a pass on health inspection. That made him fighting mad, mostly because these men assumed that he was the kind of dishonorable man who would take a bribe. In my recollection, Daddy never really sat us down for straightforward moral instruction, but everything about the way he lived, and the stories he told about the world, conveyed to us kids that if we wanted to live in a peaceful and lawful social order, then we had individual duties toward that end.

When I was in third grade, I read Roald Dahl’s book Danny, The Champion of the World, about a little English boy whose father was a poacher. I could not get over the idea that this kid, who was about my age, had a father who broke the law, and taught him that lawbreaking was normative. I bring this up not to condemn the book, but to give you an idea of the work of moral formation that my father was accomplishing within my sister and me. The father was supposed to be the incarnation of moral authority, and goodness. When he wasn’t, then the whole world made no sense. That’s how it was for me, for better or for worse. Maybe you can see why the Catholic sex abuse scandal, and the moral corruption of so many Catholic bishops (who did not enforce the moral law), tore me down to the foundations.

Anyway, my academic Evangelical reader wrote back: