After the Trump DOJ Halted Police Reform, This City Stepped In. Then Officers Shot and Killed Katelyn Hall.

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.”

© ProPublica

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