The Justice Department dissolved its role in national efforts to reform troubled police agencies across the nation in May as President Donald Trump sworn into his second term.
Authorities announced their decision to not only lose claims against two cities for illegal surveillance but even repudiate findings of mistreatment in a half dozen other places.
Some of those areas celebrated the information. Never Louisville, Kentucky, a blue area in a purple state where elected officials made their own announcement.
After the national withdrawal, Mayor Craig Greenberg said Louisville had become “moving back fast” with reforms to its police department, which had been found to have a pattern of unlawful policing. In truth, the city may be implementing a version of the transformation agreement Louisville had originally negotiated with the Biden administration and employing an outside consultant to track its progress.
” I made a promise to our community”, the governor said,” and we are keeping that guarantee”.
There was much to perform. Federal investigators discovered in 2023 that the city’s authorities regularly treated Black people unfairly, used authorities dogs in an inappropriate manner, and failed to properly treat those who faced mental health issues.
The governor said the regional reform plan would allow city leaders to correct these problems and achieve key goals, perhaps even faster than he outlined.
However, police documents obtained by ProPublica reveal just how pervasive the troubles were. Two years after the DOJ revealed its preliminary findings, while the Greenberg administration was charting its way to reform in early 2025, officers were also engaging in the dangerous policing practices called out by federal investigators, according to the records. Most notably, police officials were failing to thoroughly review officers ‘ use of force.
Community leaders and civil rights advocates claim that the reform efforts have had mixed results after a year in the city.
For example, the city has expanded a pilot program to direct some mental health calls away from police and send them instead to mental health specialists. The overall composition of the department’s mental health practices only came together for the first time in March, almost a year after it was announced, and it isn’t expected to make recommendations for another year.
” What we do as a city, we make things look good on paper, but then in the application of it, it plays out so differently”, said Shameka Parrish-Wright, a Louisville city council member and a candidate for mayor looking to unseat Greenberg later this year. ” And what plays out on the ground in day-to-day interactions is different”.
The fatal shooting of a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall in her own apartment in March underscores the dangers facing Louisville residents.
Experts in mental health told ProPublica that the incident is emblematic of practices flagged by the Justice Department more than three years ago. However, according to Paul Humphrey, the head of the Louisville Metro Police Department, the city shouldn’t be judged by one shooting because it responded to 3,200 mental health calls last year and “only about eight” of them resulted in any injuries to anyone. The incident is still under investigation.
In the aftermath of the killing, Greenberg’s office is exploring ways to pair mental health professionals with police in such situations — an idea that, critics note, was explicitly recommended in 2023 by the Justice Department. The city sends mental health professionals or police to calls today, but it does not have them respond together on serious incidents, including when a weapon is present.
Greenberg declined multiple requests for interviews, but his press secretary, Matt Mudd, defended the reform work, which he said was now being overseen by an independent monitor. ” The Louisville Metro Police Department is in a much better place than it was three years ago”, he told ProPublica in an email. That work is ongoing, and we are working closely with the community to keep it moving forward.
Humphrey, the police chief, noted that police reform can often take years to achieve under federal oversight. In contrast, Humphrey said to ProPublica,” I think we’re going at a really good clip.
Today, the city stands as a test case for how effectively a community can implement police reform without a court order and the accountability that comes with federal intervention.
” There’s no enforceability by law”, said Ed Harness, Louisville’s first-ever inspector general. He is accused of looking into police misconduct. ” Now whether reform can happen voluntarily, with compliance and supervision by elected leaders, kind of is the question that will be answered in Louisville”.
The Path to Reform
Plainclothes officers have been serving a no-knock search warrant through the door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment since March 2020, but the situation in Louisville has been under the radar since. Her boyfriend thought they were robbers and fired a single shot at them. As a result of police’s return fire, Taylor, a 26-year-old black medical worker, was killed. Her case, along with that of George Floyd in Minneapolis, helped spark a national reckoning over race and policing, and attracted the scrutiny of the Justice Department.
In 2023, just months after Greenberg took office, the DOJ published a scathing report on the police department’s pattern of misconduct and constitutional violations. By December 2024, the city and the DOJ had made the details of a court order known as a consent decree that would set standards for improvements and be overseen by an outsider monitor and a judge. Greenberg touted the city’s commitment to “aggressively implement police reform”.
However, the questionable police behavior continued in the months that followed. Police records first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and later by ProPublica through a public records request detail nearly 50 use-of-force incidents from December 2024 through April 2025. In more than half of them, officers engaged in actions that the Justice Department had noted in 2023 were either violations of people’s rights, like using choke holds and allowing police dogs to continue biting people who no longer posed a threat, or otherwise needed improvement, like how supervisors reviewed such incidents.
In one instance, a suspect spits on a police officer before “takedown” the suspect while he was already in handcuffs. In another, multiple witnesses said an officer put his knee on a man’s back while he lay on the ground, a tactic that has been widely condemned since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck in 2020. The department’s internal review unit determined that the uses of force were appropriate in both those instances, as well as others. According to the records, the review unit failed to discuss alternative approaches or completely review all uses of force by the officers involved.
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director for the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, said her team requested the records in Louisville and six other jurisdictions to assess whether they corrected the problems flagged by the DOJ in its investigations.
She claimed that in light of the criticism the DOJ had made of what it called “biased” internal investigations and that her organization expected oversight to be extra vigilant.
” We were troubled by a review process that seemed more concerned with protecting the agency from liability than with protecting the public from further abuse”, she said.
The use-of-force review process and ProPublica’s inquiry into the Louisville police department were not answered by the department.
Last May, just five months after the consent decree was signed, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, announced the department was dropping the case against Louisville, ending what she called the “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees”.
Questions About the City’s Engagement
The same day, Greenberg unveiled his administration’s reform plan, dubbed the Community Commitment, and pledged to hire an independent monitor to oversee the police department’s progress. Civil rights activists and community leaders noticed the document’s significant differences from the federal reform plan. Most notably, it had no mechanism for enforcement in the event of a disagreement between the monitor and the police department. Under a federal consent decree, a federal judge makes the final decisions on such disputes and can force departments to implement corrective actions. Simply put, Louisville’s plan calls for continued discussions between the parties.
That makes the policy initiative vulnerable to the vagaries of politics or local budgeting, critics say.
The biggest danger is that it will just end up being too difficult, too expensive, and not politically beneficial for this or the next administrations to continue this effort, according to Georgetown Law professor Christy Lopez, who spent years conducting inquiries into police misconduct for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. ” That is one advantage that consent decrees offer, that they have the oversight and threat of a federal judge, who can make contempt findings if people are not doing what they said they would do. You don’t have that here”.
Due to this, several community leaders want to include important provisions of the agreement in local law. ” We need an ordinance that makes sure the reforms from the consent decree are done regardless of administration”, said Kungu Njuguna, a lifelong resident of Louisville and a policy strategist for the Kentucky ACLU.
Ericka Seward, a community activist who has been campaigning for police accountability since Taylor’s killing in 2020, said the current reform plan requires residents to trust the police to make change — a difficult task, she said, given the department’s history of discriminatory policing.
Seward, a Black woman, claimed she witnessed police beating her son, age 21, in the parking lot of his apartment building in 2022. He had called her during a traffic stop for what police said was erratic driving, and she drove to the location. When he argued that the stop was a hoax and told the officers he would be complaining to members of the department’s leadership who his mother knew through her work as an activist, Seward said, officers were about to let him go with a warning when he argued that the stop was a hoax and told them he would be complaining, according to Seward. The officers then physically pulled him back to their car and told him they were now going to issue him tickets, she said. Her son was cited for careless driving and failure to signal.
Seward said,” It was scary to me, it was scary to him.” ” Because we know what they’re capable of”.
Seward complained to the office of the city inspector general. According to its report, the lead officer defended his actions, telling investigators that, because Seward’s son was accusing him of not having a valid reason for the stop, he “became concerned and wanted to document the stop to show that he did have probable cause”.
While Harness ‘ office found no wrongdoing on that count, it did note that the officer couldn’t say how fast Seward’s son was driving. Additionally, it recommended that a policy be put in place that the department did not have, according to records, and that one be adopted. The department has since done so, though that too has drawn criticism from Harness ‘ office, which said its recommendation was “largely ignored”. According to the inspector general’s report, the revised policy only applies to retaliation after a complaint has been filed, meaning it does not apply to “retaliatory policing” in response to” citizens ‘ words, actions, or demeanor.”
In its 2023 investigation, the Justice Department found that Louisville police officers had” threatened and retaliated against civilian complainants”. It also found that Black drivers were nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be cited by police for minor violations — part of a pattern of discriminatory policing that investigators said often led to unnecessary and tense interactions between police and the public, sometimes resulting in arrest. The DOJ observed racial disparities in law enforcement because of littering, loitering, and using dark window tinting.
The federal consent decree dictated that those kinds of offenses receive warnings unless an officer could articulate why that approach was “insufficient” to deal with the issue. However, the city’s reform plan does not allow for that change.
Humphrey said that leaders determined the measure wasn’t in the best interest of the city or its officers. He also said police are trained on how to best determine the right course of action on those low-level infractions.
A Mental Health Crisis, a Deadly Encounter
Many of the DOJ’s suggestions for handling people with mental health issues were included in the city’s plan. Such incidents made up nearly a quarter of the use-of-force cases investigators reviewed, according to the federal report,” and a large share of those incidents involved at least one unreasonable use of force”.
The city’s plan included a number of measures, starting with the formation of a behavioral health council to review incidents and recommend changes to policies and practices with the goal of “reducing the number of police encounters with people with behavioral health disabilities involving unnecessary use of force and reducing the severity of the force when force is required”.
However, the council’s first meeting was held in March, which was roughly 10 months after the mayor’s announcement. Police officials told ProPublica that city leaders decided to first hire the independent monitor and develop an implementation plan before putting the behavioral council to work.
Four days after the group’s initial meeting, Louisville police received a 911 call about Katelyn Hall, the 28-year-old woman in a mental health crisis. She had locked herself in the bathroom and, according to her roommate, had cut her wrists and ingested cleaning fluids, and was behaving erratically. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had previously attempted suicide.
Within 13 minutes of their arrival, she was shot and killed by police.
” No one wants to see an outcome like this”, Humphrey said in early April during a press conference. ” We have already begun to use this incident to work on improving how we handle these situations. That is owed to everyone involved and the city.
But mental health and law enforcement experts who reviewed police body camera footage of the incident told ProPublica that officers demonstrated some of the same problematic behaviors first identified by the Justice Department more than three years ago.
According to the federal investigators, Louisville employees “frequently fail to give people in crisis time or space” and “do not engage in verbal de-escalation for enough time to succeed.” In fact, officers often made the situation more tense and confrontational, which would lead to “increased safety risks to themselves and the person in crisis and increased the likelihood of the use of force”.
In Hall’s case, the officers started out asking questions like,” What’s going on”? and” Can you talk to me?” while Hall screamed at them to let her die.
Before a member of the Emergency Medical Services unit, concerned that Hall had cut her wrists, suggested forcing the door open, the officers talked to her for about six minutes before recommending forcing the door open. The team spent the next three minutes breaking the door’s lock and popping one of its hinges, during which time the officers pushed themselves against the door attempting to get into the bathroom.
Sharon Gandarilla-Javier, an assistant professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called it a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, but stressed that the six minutes of discussion wasn’t enough time and the police should have considered alternatives to forcing the door open.
For instance, Rebecca Hall’s mother, who was present, identified herself to first responders assuming they would ask her to talk to her daughter. They never did.
Hall’s mother, according to Mariela Ruiz-Angel, director of Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety’s “game changer” initiatives.
” We’ve used that tactic multiple times to try to find the loved one that makes the most sense, to be like,’ Hey, I’m here, Mama’s here,'” she said.
At one point, an officer tells Hall,” I want you to live”, and that her friends and family are worried about her.
In order to prepare for Hall’s exit from the locked room, the responders decided which officers would use their hands, a Taser, and a firearm. But Gandarilla-Javier, who spent more than 10 years as a New York Police Department officer and teaches classes on trauma-informed policing and crisis intervention, told ProPublica that the plan overheard on the video needed to be more detailed, with an explicit discussion about how to safely subdue Hall if she were to advance on them.
She was attempting to enter the building while Hall ultimately opened the door and turned her toward the officers while she was removing a piece of toilet. Within five seconds, she was shot by two officers, including the one who minutes before had told her he wanted her to live. Had the officers planned better, the outcome may have been different, Gandarilla-Javier said.
In the Hall case, according to Louisville Metro Police Deputy Chief Emily McKinley,” I think it could be an extremely lethal situation” for the officers. In April, McKinley said, “each encounter poses a unique and frequently chaotic challenge.” Asked whether officers could have instead tackled Hall, she declined to answer, saying such questions would be part of the investigation into the shooting.
According to Hall’s mother, police could have done more.
” My daughter deserved more than eight minutes of their time”, Rebecca Hall said through tears in an interview. ” She needed kindness and she needed somebody back there” to let her know that they cared. Hall continued,” She didn’t get that in that moment. I know she definitely didn’t need bullets. She simply required assistance.
Mental health advocates like Khalilah Collins have been pushing for years for the department to allow mental health professionals to lead the response to such calls. In fact, she was part of a group of professionals who, at the city’s request, researched alternative responses in 2021. The study was a component of the reforms that the city agreed to carry out in a settlement settlement following Taylor’s death, but a nonpolice response didn’t gain the support of city leaders and didn’t get implemented.
” We refuse to build what we need for people”, Collins said. We don’t want to see police there, they say. The police don’t want to be there. They’re not trained to be there, but we refuse to do anything else”.
In this instance, police determined that Hall was “armed with glass,” so the department did develop a program to divert some calls to mental health professionals. Louisville police policy dictates that if a weapon is present, mental health professionals cannot respond to the calls.
However, Greenberg and Humphrey claim they are now looking into whether police and mental health professionals should be able to respond together in the wake of Hall’s passing. According to Mudd, the mayor’s spokesperson, one option being discussed involves using “new technology, like cameras, to add behavioral health providers to situations that require their expertise without potentially sacrificing their safety”.
When ProPublica asked Mudd if there was a timeline for making a decision, he said only that the city and the police department were “moving with urgency”.
This City Stepped In After the Trump DOJ Halted Police Reform. Then Officers Shot and Killed Katelyn Hall. first appeared on ProPublica.
