Last May, as President Donald Trump settled into his second term, the Justice Department walked away from federal efforts to reform troubled police departments across the country.

Officials announced their decision to not only drop lawsuits against two cities for unconstitutional policing but also retract findings of abuse in a half dozen other places.

Some of those jurisdictions celebrated the news. But not Louisville, Kentucky, a blue city in a red state whose elected leaders used the occasion to make their own announcement.

After the federal withdrawal, Mayor Craig Greenberg said Louisville would be “moving ahead rapidly” with reforms to its police department, which had been found to have a pattern of unconstitutional policing. In fact, the city would be adopting a version of the reform agreement Louisville had previously negotiated with the Biden administration and hiring an outside monitor to oversee its progress.

“I made a promise to our community,” the mayor said, “and we are keeping that promise.”

There was much to do. In 2023, federal investigators had found that the city’s police routinely discriminated against Black residents, inappropriately used police dogs against people, and failed to properly respond to people facing mental health challenges.

The mayor said the local reform plan would allow city leaders to correct these problems and accomplish key goals, perhaps even faster than he outlined.

But police records obtained by ProPublica show just how entrenched the issues were. Two years after the DOJ revealed its initial findings, while the Greenberg administration was charting its path to reform in early 2025, officers were still engaging in the problematic policing practices called out by federal investigators, according to the records. Most notably, police officials were failing to thoroughly review officers’ use of force.

Today, one year into the city’s reform effort, community leaders and civil rights advocates say the results have been mixed.

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. Yet a panel created to review the department’s mental health practices overall only met for the first time in March, almost a year after it was announced, and it isn’t scheduled to issue 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.”

Underscoring the stakes for Louisville residents is the March fatal shooting of a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall, who was experiencing a mental health crisis when police gunned her down in her own apartment.

Experts in mental health told ProPublica that the incident is emblematic of practices flagged by the Justice Department more than three years ago. Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Paul Humphrey, however, said the department should not be judged by one shooting given that it responded to 3,200 mental health calls last year and “only about eight resulted in any injury 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. Today, the city sends either mental health professionals or police to calls, but does not have them respond together on critical 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 partnering closely with the community to ensure progress continues.”

Humphrey, the police chief, noted that police reform can often take years to achieve under federal oversight. By comparison, Humphrey told 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 charged with investigating misconduct in the police department. “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

Policing in Louisville has been under a national microscope since March 2020, when plainclothes officers broke down the door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment serving a no-knock search warrant. Her boyfriend thought they were robbers and fired a single shot at them. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker, was killed as police returned fire. 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 announced the details of a court agreement, known as a consent decree, that would set requirements for improvements and be overseen by an outside monitor and a judge. Greenberg touted the city’s commitment to “aggressively implement police reform.”

In the following months, however, the questionable police behavior continued. 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 case, a suspect spit on an officer, who then performed a “takedown” of the man 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. In both those instances, as well as others, the department’s internal review unit found the uses of force to be appropriate. 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.

In Louisville, she said her organization expected oversight to be extra diligent given the DOJ’s criticism of what it called “biased” internal investigations.

“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 Louisville police department did not respond to ProPublica’s inquiry about the records and the use-of-force review process.

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 Over City’s Commitment

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. The document carried over much of the federal reform plan, but civil rights advocates and community leaders noticed it differed in key ways. 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. Louisville’s plan simply calls for the parties to have continued talks.

That makes the policy initiative vulnerable to the vagaries of politics or local budgeting, critics say.

“That’s the biggest risk here, that it will just prove to be too difficult, too expensive, not politically advantageous for this or subsequent administrations to continue this effort,” said Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law who spent years investigating 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.”

Because of that, several community leaders want to enshrine key parts 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, who is Black, said she watched officers manhandle her 21-year-old son in the parking lot of his apartment complex in 2022. He had called her during a traffic stop for what police said was erratic driving, and she drove to the location. After patting him down, officers were about to let him go with a warning when he argued that the stop was dubious 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. 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.

“It was scary to me, it was scary to him,” Seward said. “Because we know what they’re capable of.”

Seward filed a complaint with the city inspector general’s office. 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. It also found that the department did not have a policy prohibiting retaliation and recommended that one be adopted, according to records. The department has since done so, though that too has drawn criticism from Harness’ office, which said its recommendation was “largely ignored.” The revised policy only applies to retaliation after a complaint has been filed, the inspector general’s report said, meaning it does not cover 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 noted racial disparities in enforcement for loitering, littering and having 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. That change, however, is not in the city’s reform plan.

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

The city did incorporate into its plan many of the DOJ’s recommendations for handling people with mental health issues. 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.”

The council, however, didn’t have its first meeting until March — about 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 had its first meeting, Louisville police responded to a 911 call about Katelyn Hall, the 28-year-old woman in 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, police shot and killed her.

“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. We owe that to everyone involved and to 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.

The federal investigators found Louisville officers “frequently fail to give people experiencing crisis time or space” and “do not engage in verbal de-escalation for enough time to be successful.” 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.

Police spent about six minutes talking with her before a member of the Emergency Medical Services unit, worried that Hall had cut her wrists, suggested 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 example, Hall’s mother, Rebecca, was on scene and identified herself to first responders, assuming they would ask her to help talk with her daughter. They never did.

Mariela Ruiz-Angel, the director of alternative response initiatives for Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, said Hall’s mother could have been a “game changer.”

“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. 

The responders designated which officers would use their hands, a Taser and a firearm in preparation for Hall’s exit from the locked room. 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.

When Hall ultimately opened the door and walked toward the officers, she was holding a broken 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.

Louisville Metro Police Deputy Chief Emily McKinley told reporters in April that “each encounter poses a unique and often chaotic challenge,” and that in the Hall case, “If you look at the porcelain, I think it could be an extremely lethal situation” for the officers. Asked whether officers could have instead tackled Hall, she declined to answer, saying such questions would be part of the investigation into the shooting.

Hall’s mother said 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 just needed help.”

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 part of the reforms that the city pledged to undertake in a lawsuit settlement after Taylor’s killing, but a nonpolice response failed to win the support of city leaders and wasn’t adopted.

“We refuse to build what we need for people,” Collins said. “We don’t want the police there. The police don’t want to be there. They’re not trained to be there, but we refuse to do anything else.”

To be sure, the department did create a program to divert some calls to mental health professionals, but that did not happen in this case because police determined Hall was “armed with glass.” Louisville police policy dictates that if a weapon is present, mental health professionals cannot respond to the calls.

In the wake of Hall’s death, though, Greenberg and Humphrey say they are now exploring whether police and mental health professionals should be allowed to respond together. 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.”