Louisville drops DOJ oversight—then Katelyn Hall is killed

Louisville police – Louisville, Kentucky said it would move quickly on police reforms after the Trump Justice Department withdrew from a consent decree. But nearly a year into the city’s locally run plan, community advocates point to slow progress on mental-health changes and lin

By the time Louisville police arrived at Katelyn Hall’s apartment in March, the city had already staked its credibility on becoming the kind of place where reform could happen without federal supervision.

Hall, 28, was in a mental health crisis. According to her roommate, she had locked herself in the bathroom, cut her wrists, ingested cleaning fluids, and was behaving erratically. Within 13 minutes of police arriving, officers shot and killed her.

For city leaders who had been trying to prove reform could be voluntary, the killing landed like a verdict before the process had fully matured.

Last May, the U.S. Department of Justice walked away from federal efforts to reshape troubled police departments nationwide. The Justice Department not only dropped lawsuits against two cities over unconstitutional policing but also retracted findings of abuse in a half dozen other places. Louisville did not celebrate. Mayor Craig Greenberg used the federal retreat to announce that Louisville would move ahead on its own.

Greenberg said Louisville would be “moving ahead rapidly” with changes to the police department that had been found to have a pattern of unconstitutional policing. He said the city would adopt a version of the reform agreement Louisville previously negotiated with the Biden administration and would hire an outside monitor to oversee progress.

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

In 2023, federal investigators had found Louisville police routinely discriminated against Black residents, inappropriately used police dogs against people, and failed to properly respond to people facing mental health challenges.

But records obtained by ProPublica show how entrenched those concerns remained even as the Greenberg administration laid out its path to reform in early 2025. Two years after the DOJ revealed its initial findings. Louisville officers were still engaging in the kinds of problematic policing practices the department had called out—most notably. failing to thoroughly review officers’ use of force.

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

Shameka Parrish-Wright, a Louisville city council member and a candidate for mayor looking to unseat Greenberg later this year, said the city’s approach can look different depending on where you stand.

“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,” she said. “And what plays out on the ground in day-to-day interactions is different.”

A key focus has been mental health responses—where advocates argue time and training can be the difference between intervention and tragedy. The city has expanded a pilot program to direct some mental health calls away from police and send them instead to mental health specialists. But 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 was not scheduled to issue recommendations for another year.

The Hall shooting became the kind of incident reform proponents had feared while the city moved on its own timeline.

Mental health experts told ProPublica that the case is emblematic of practices flagged by the Justice Department more than three years ago. Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Paul Humphrey said the department should not be judged by one shooting. pointing to the overall volume of calls. The chief said the department responded to 3. 200 mental health calls last year and “only about eight resulted in any injury to anyone.” The incident remained under investigation.

In the aftermath of Hall’s death. Greenberg’s office is exploring ways to pair mental health professionals with police for situations like hers. Critics note that the concept 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. His press secretary, Matt Mudd, defended the reform work, saying it is now overseen by an independent monitor.

“The Louisville Metro Police Department is in a much better place than it was three years ago,” Mudd told ProPublica in an email. “That work is ongoing, and we are partnering closely with the community to ensure progress continues.”

Humphrey argued reforms often take years to achieve under federal oversight, while Louisville’s changes were accelerating.

“I think we’re going at a really good clip,” Humphrey told ProPublica.

Still, Louisville now sits in a spotlight as a test case for a specific question: whether a city can overhaul police practices without a court order and the enforceable accountability that comes with federal intervention.

“There’s no enforceability by law,” Ed Harness said. Harness is Louisville’s first-ever inspector general, 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 in Louisville has been shaped by national trauma. Policing in the city came under intense scrutiny after March 2020. when plainclothes officers broke down the door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment serving a no-knock search warrant. Taylor. a 26-year-old Black medical worker. was killed when her boyfriend thought officers were robbers and fired a single shot at them as police returned fire.

That case, and the national reckoning that followed, drew Justice Department attention. In 2023, months after Greenberg took office, the DOJ published a report describing a pattern of misconduct and constitutional violations by Louisville police.

By December 2024, the city and the DOJ announced the details of a court agreement—a consent decree—aimed at setting requirements for improvements, overseen by an outside monitor and a judge. Greenberg touted the city’s commitment to “aggressively implement police reform.”

But behavior changes did not arrive cleanly.

According to police records first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and later provided to ProPublica through a public records request. Louisville officers were involved in nearly 50 use-of-force incidents from December 2024 through April 2025. In more than half of those incidents. actions were either violations of people’s rights—such as using choke holds and allowing police dogs to continue biting people who no longer posed a threat—or needed improvement. including how supervisors reviewed the incidents.

One incident described in the records involved a suspect spitting on an officer. after which the officer performed a “takedown” while the man was already in handcuffs. Another involved multiple witnesses saying an officer put a knee on a man’s back while he lay on the ground—an approach condemned widely since George Floyd was murdered in 2020.

In both those instances, and others, the department’s internal review unit said the uses of force were appropriate. According to the records, however, the review unit failed to discuss alternative approaches or completely review all uses of force by the officers involved.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, 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 issues flagged by the Justice Department.

In Louisville, Borchetta 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.

Just five months after the consent decree was signed. Harmeet Dhillon. head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. announced the Justice Department was dropping the case against Louisville. Dhillon said it ended what she called the “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”.

That same day, Greenberg unveiled the city’s reform plan—dubbed the Community Commitment—and pledged to hire an independent monitor.

The document carried over much of the federal reform framework. but civil rights advocates and community leaders noticed a decisive difference. It lacked a mechanism for enforcement if the monitor and the police department disagreed. Under the federal consent decree. a federal judge makes final decisions on disputes and can force departments to implement corrective actions. Louisville’s plan, critics say, leaves disagreements to continued talks.

Christy Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor who spent years investigating police misconduct for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, described what she views as the central risk.

“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,” Lopez said.

She added that consent decrees come with the threat of a judge and consequences for noncompliance.

“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,” she said.

Because of the vulnerability they see in the local approach. community leaders have pushed for key parts of the reforms to be written into local law. Kungu Njuguna. a lifelong Louisville resident and a policy strategist for the Kentucky ACLU. said the city needs an ordinance that would make the changes apply regardless of administration.

“We need an ordinance that makes sure the reforms from the consent decree are done regardless of administration,” Njuguna said.

Ericka Seward, an activist who has campaigned for police accountability since Breonna Taylor’s killing in 2020, said she doubts the city can ask residents to trust police to deliver change after years of discriminatory enforcement.

Seward said she watched officers manhandle her 21-year-old son in 2022 after he called her during a traffic stop for what police said was erratic driving. She drove to the apartment complex, she said. After patting him down. she said officers were about to let him go with a warning when her son argued the stop was dubious and said he would be complaining to department leaders whom Seward knew through her activism.

The officers, Seward said, physically pulled her son back to their car and told him they would issue him tickets instead. He 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. The report said the lead officer defended his actions by 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.” The inspector general’s office found no wrongdoing on that count.

Harness’ office did say, however, that the officer couldn’t say how fast Seward’s son was driving. It also said the department did not have a policy prohibiting retaliation and recommended that one be adopted, according to records.

The department adopted a revised policy, but the inspector general’s office criticized it as limiting. The updated policy applies only to retaliation after a complaint is filed, Harness’ office said. It does not cover retaliatory policing in response to “citizens’ words, actions or demeanor.”

In its 2023 investigation. the Justice Department found Louisville officers “threatened and retaliated against civilian complainants.” It also found Black drivers were nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be cited by police for minor violations—patterns investigators said often caused unnecessary and tense interactions that sometimes escalated to arrests. The DOJ noted racial disparities in enforcement for loitering, littering and having dark window tinting.

The consent decree required that those kinds of offenses receive warnings unless an officer could articulate why that approach was “insufficient.” Greenberg’s reform plan does not include that change. Humphrey said leaders decided the measure wasn’t in the best interest of the city or its officers. adding that police are trained to determine how to handle low-level infractions.

If the dispute over minor offenses reflects the city’s broader challenge—how to carry out detailed court-grade changes without court-level enforcement—mental health responses have been where the gap has been hardest to measure in real time.

The city did incorporate many DOJ recommendations for mental health. In the federal report, mental health incidents made up nearly a quarter of the use-of-force cases investigators reviewed, and investigators said a large share involved at least one unreasonable use of force.

Louisville’s plan included the formation of a behavioral health council to review incidents and recommend changes aimed at reducing police encounters with people with behavioral health disabilities involving unnecessary force and reducing the severity of force when it is required.

But the council did not have its first meeting until March—about 10 months after the mayor’s announcement. Police officials told ProPublica city leaders decided to hire the independent monitor and develop an implementation plan before putting the behavioral council to work.

Four days after the council’s first meeting, Louisville police responded to the 911 call about Katelyn Hall.

Officers spent about six minutes talking with her. As she screamed for them to let her die. officers asked questions including “What’s going on?” and “Can you talk to me?” After EMS members worried she had cut her wrists. they suggested forcing the door open. The team spent the next three minutes breaking the door’s lock and popping one hinge. during which officers pushed themselves against the door attempting to get inside.

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. She said. though. that six minutes of discussion was not enough time and that police should have considered alternatives to forcing the door open.

Hall’s mother, Rebecca, was on scene and identified herself to first responders, assuming they would ask her to help talk with her daughter. The reporting said they never did.

Mariela Ruiz-Angel, 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,’” Ruiz-Angel said.

At one point, an officer told Hall, “I want you to live,” and that her friends and family were worried about her.

As Hall opened the door and walked toward officers holding a broken piece of toilet, two officers shot her within five seconds, including the one who minutes before had told her he wanted her to live.

Gandarilla-Javier said that if officers had planned better, the outcome may have been different. She said the plan heard on the video needed to be more detailed, with an explicit discussion about how to safely subdue Hall if she advanced.

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

Rebecca Hall said her daughter deserved more time and more compassion.

“My daughter deserved more than eight minutes of their time,” 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.”.

Khalilah Collins. a mental health advocate. has pushed for years for a model where mental health professionals lead responses to crises. She said she was part of a group of professionals who, at the city’s request, researched alternative responses in 2021. That study was part of reforms the city pledged to undertake after Taylor’s killing in the lawsuit settlement. but the effort to build nonpolice responses did not win support and was never 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.”

The department created a program meant to divert some calls to mental health professionals, Collins said. But in Hall’s case, officers determined Hall was “armed with glass.” Louisville police policy dictates that when a weapon is present, mental health professionals cannot respond.

In the wake of Hall’s death. Greenberg and Humphrey said they are now exploring whether police and mental health professionals should be allowed to respond together. Mudd said 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, he said only that the city and the police department were “moving with urgency.”

For Louisville, the question now isn’t only what reforms are on the books. It is what happens when a city has to decide, quickly and under pressure, whether its own safeguards are strong enough without the leverage of a federal judge.

Louisville police reform DOJ consent decree Craig Greenberg Paul Humphrey Katelyn Hall mental health crisis response community commitment Ed Harness inspector general use of force racial disparities Breonna Taylor