DOJ investigates LPMD

The scrutiny is deeply welcome. Louisville's problem with race and the police department stretches back generations.

News this week that the Department of Justice will investigate Louisville’s police department flushed memories of coverage long ago, when I was just starting out as a journalist as one of the original reporters for LEO, the alt-weekly founded by John Yarmuth.

It was the late 90s and there had been a string of police killings of Black men in Louisville — something that was not new, not even 25 years ago, and the city was on edge. Many of the men had been unarmed, or handcuffed, and killed anyway.

The late Louis Coleman, whom I got to know well over the years, Ann Braden and others had in about 1999 gotten begun pushing the idea of West Louisville seceding to become its own city. It had struck me as a bad idea, but one that grew out of honest despair over the seemingly unending examples of the ways Blacks in Louisville had been relegated to second-class status, even a full generation past the Civil Rights era.

Of the many conversations I had that year about the treatment of Black Louisvillians by members of the mostly white police force, the one that stood out to me the most was with an older man who rose to speak at a community forum in favor of the secession effort.

He told me later that he walked daily the sidewalks in his west end neighborhood, he would inevitably be stopped briefly by an officer on the beat. The question was nearly always the same: “Where you going, boy?”

“Everyday,” he told me. “I am a grown man, and I have to be talked to like that?”

‘Boy’ of course was racist. But what struck me most was the fact that a member of the city police thought he had any business at all asking a citizen where he was going in the first place. As if he was walking on the sidewalk by the leave of some patient power that, on a different day, might take that privilege away.

Funny how a single encounter can leave you shook, and stay with you all these years later. Against all the headlines that summer, maybe it wasn’t very important, but the casual assumptions in those encounters had embittered the old man and said so much to me about the racism in Louisville still prevalent in the police force.

A short while later, there Shawnee Park was hosting the annual family picnics the West End had hosted for so many years. Tensions were high and the police turned out in force to "keep the peace.” Scores of officers arrived at the park early and took their orders for how to spread out during the day-long festivities. The old man’s words came back to me as I watched the officers get their morning briefing: Not a single one was Black.

How could a police force protect and respect a community if they couldn’t be bothered to even try to reflect that community in its own ranks? That, too, wasn’t a new problem. A 1979 federal class-action suit against the city, Louisville Black Police, etc v City of Louisville, showed in the 1970s that hiring Black officers was as rare then as a September snowfall:

The next year, Mayor Dave Armstrong made a big stir in Louisville by firing Chief Gene Sherrard, and it remains one of the more courageous acts by a Louisville mayor I’ve seen. Sherrard had presided the night before over an awards ceremony at the Galt House honoring two police officers who were then under investigation for yet another LMPD killing of an unarmed Black man — a killing that had sparked outrage and Armstrong’s strong condemnation. When word got out that Armstrong had fired him, on-duty officers from across the city had left their beats and formed a parade of cruisers that slowly drove downtown as a show of force, and attempted intimidation.

Armstrong stood his ground, but the police union had shown its priorities.

So when the FOP issued a statement this week saying they welcomed the DOJ investigation because it hoped to find corroboration with its beef — that the mayor had overseen a depletion of the police ranks — it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. This was the same union that in 2015 issued a statement to Louisville’s “criminal element” and its “liars and race-baiters” anyone else who failed to support the LPMD that it was taking note and keeping score.

I don’t know what the DOJ will find. It has investigated about 60 police departments since gaining the statutory authority to do so. Forty of those inquiries have led to either court-order consent decrees or memos of understanding reached directly with local officials. They’ve involved agreements or orders in Cincinnati, Ferguson, Chicago and Seattle, to name a few. (Page 41 of the linked report is a good place for summaries of each.)

In most cases, those agreements have led to substantial reforms — or promises to change. Whether they’ve made a difference in the lives of the people who interact with police in those cities, particularly people of color, I don’t know. That’s a question worth asking.

What I do know is that for anyone living through the last year of protests and heartache, the news of the DOJ attention must be welcome. What they are likely to find is that LPMD’s treatment of Black residents has been under indictment by those same residents and many others for generations.