LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer and Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Erika Shields gave an update to public safety reform in the city last week amid an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice pattern or practice investigation into Louisville Metro Government (Louisville Metro) and LMPD.

After a sit-down interview with Fischer and Shields Wednesday to talk about the update, Spectrum News 1 spoke with two community members involved in social issues and change within Louisville to hear their thoughts. 

What You Need To Know

  • Last week, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer and Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Erika Shields gave an update to public safety reform in the city last week amid an ongoing investigation by DOJ into the city and police department 

  • Spectrum News 1 interviewed two community members involved with organizing, social issues and change within Louisville to hear their thoughts on the public safety update

  • Angela Johnson with Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together said “time will tell” whether actions taken will make a change

  • Khalilah Collins, a social worker and social justice organizer, said it feels like the city and police department are “checking a box”

“Time will tell.” That’s what Angela Johnson said about the 154 actions Louisville Metro said have been taken to reform public safety.

“I think part of it, too, is in the practice, and the second part of it is continued funding because it looks like what has happened before is some of the initiatives that come down are funded in the budget for maybe one year. Then, when it’s time for the budget cycle again, they don’t get funded,” Johnson said. 

Johnson is a Louisville pastor at Grace Hope Presbyterian Church and co-president of Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together. Called CLOUT for short, the organization is made up of religious congregations with more than 12,000 members who work to solve community problems in the city. 

In 2021, CLOUT championed for a police-community reconciliation framework by the National Network for Safe Communities to be implemented in Louisville. Called “Truth and Transformation,” the initiative is underway in Louisville.

Along with training of police staff, which includes learning about the history of policing, the framework calls for an “Acknowledgment of Harm,” which admits problems caused by law enforcement. NNSC recommends this comes from a city leader, preferably a police chief, according to an update NNSC Director of Legitimacy and Reconciliation Paul Smith gave to Louisville Metro Council’s Public Safety Committee about the initiative on Wed., Aug. 31. 

Spectrum News 1 asked LMPD Police Chief Shields about this “Acknowledgment of Harm” during a sit-down interview last Wednesday and she said, “And so for me, it’s really important that I speak about this on a regular basis. I’m not going to go to a podium and pontificate about it one day, wash my hands and say, ‘This is done.’ It’s not done. I have a job to continually educate the department.“

Johnson said CLOUT wants a press conference with an “Acknowledgment of Harm.”

“Not pontificating but explaining and speaking honestly to people about it. That’s what makes all the difference too because then we get the understanding that’s coming from [the top ranks of LMPD], down,” Johnson explained.

Last Tuesday, Louisville’s mayor and police chief gave their public safety update to a roomful of invited community members, like Khalilah Collins.

“I think they are trying — they just aren’t trying hard enough. Again, it feels very performative and when you talk about transformation, the city cannot transform until there has been a public acknowledgment of what actually happened here,” Collins said.

Collins’, who splits her time between New Orleans and Louisville, career focuses on social work and social justice, and she was recently appointed community empowerment director at Spalding University’s School of Social Work. Collins also facilitated focus groups in Louisville as part of the creation of the 911 alternative responder crisis diversion program that's being tried out in a few LMPD districts. 

Collins told Spectrum News 1 she attended her first protest on police brutality in about two decades ago, and in 2020, she also protested in Louisville. 

“People who came to that square for hundreds of days didn’t just come for Breonna [Taylor], they came because they were children in the [LMPD] Explorer Program. They came because their door had been kicked in by cops. They came because they have been pulled over and harassed. They came because their cousin was killed by police a year before this,” Collins said.

“We cannot keep equating this time to just Breonna [Taylor]. Breonna was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She was not the first, and we know she wasn’t the last,” Collins added.

Fischer told Spectrum News 1 during a sit-down interview last Wednesday that the city has responded to the 2020 protests and the death of Breonna Taylor by implementing reforms to LMPD and making non-police investments into the community.

“And I think the work has come together because of good teamwork. Teamwork from the protest group, from the police department and their goal to be the best police department in the country, from our administration, to say out of this tragedy, we are going to honor the pain by improving police and community trust,” Fischer said. 

Collins said Fischer and Shield’s presentation last Tuesday showing actions taken by the city and LMPD to reform public safety felt like checked boxes.

“It was very responsive and not necessarily proactive, preventative,” Collins told Spectrum News 1.

When Spectrum News 1 asked Collins what a proactive and preventative approach would look like, she said, "I did a year’s worth of community focus groups around public safety and community safety, and I told the mayor and the chief that people weren’t talking about banning no-knock warrants or body [camera] mandates. They were talking about needing access to healthy foods, to affordable housing, to livable wages and jobs, as their means of public safety,” 

On Sat., Sept. 10 the mayor and police chief live-streamed their public safety update and took community questions afterward. Collins said that’s a start but there needs to be more community engagement.

“So there needs to be a tour. You need to stop at every church, every community center, every whatever it needs to be a conversation. It can’t just be a 45-minute presentation with 10-minute question and answer periods. That’s not a conversation. That’s a presentation,” Collins said.

A dashboard on LMPD’s website keeps track of the department’s progress in tackling the recommendations by the Hillard Heintze report, which was a top-to-bottom review of LMPD commissioned by the city and published in January 2021. 

Conducted by a third-party Chicago-based consulting firm, Hillard Heintze, the recommendations are broken down into 12 topics, such as bias-free policing and use of force and de-escalation.

“It’s again, checklist. That dashboard doesn’t tell us anything. It doesn’t say anything. It has a recommendation, and it says ‘in progress’ or ‘not in progress’, but it doesn’t say what the progress is,” Collins said. 

Collins added, “If you want [the] community to trust you. If you want [the] community to be invested in these reforms or these measurements, like you have to talk to them, and you have to be able to have real, real hard conversations, and I think we’re still not there to have those real hard conversations.”