A few weeks after Paul Humphrey was named interim chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department, a crowd gathered to meet him outside a grocery store in the city’s West End.
Ilet White stopped to say hello to the man she’s seen on the news.
“I told him I'm proud of all the work that they're doing,” White said.
Humphrey will need support like that to turn around Louisville’s troubled police department.
He’ll also need time.
Policing experts say it can take years to reform a department the size of Louisville’s, one with about 800 officers and a range of problems — many detailed by U.S. Department of Justice investigators who found LMPD has a pattern of violating people’s civil rights by using excessive force and discrimination.
And chiefs don’t always last long enough to see promised reforms come to fruition.
This has been the case in Louisville, where two mayors have churned through six police chiefs in the past four years. The revolving door of police leadership here is a stark example of an emerging trend in big cities across the country: Chiefs are on the chopping block.
In recent months, chiefs have shuffled out and been replaced in Chattanooga, Seattle and Austin. Nationwide, the turnover rate for big-city police chiefs is up to 80% this year, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington D.C.-based research organization that helps recruit and train police executives.
“I think a lot of this has to do with public expectations, the scrutiny, and the challenge of managing a big-city police department,” he said.
According to Wexler, there are 18,000 police departments in the country. The vast majority have less than 50 officers, Wexler said. About 70 departments, including Louisville, are what his organization considers a major-city police department.
In the past decade, LMPD officers have sexually abused kids in a youth program, lied to get a search warrant to raid Breonna Taylor’s home, thrown slushies at dozens of pedestrians and pulled over and hassled a preacher and a homecoming king. They’ve been sentenced to federal prison and faced sexual abuse and harassment allegations.
The most recent chief to depart from LMPD, Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel, made headlines when she testified in Jefferson Circuit Court last year that she wasn’t wearing a body camera when she arrived at the scene of a 2021 fatal police chase. Video footage showed Gwinn-Villaroel was, in fact, wearing a body camera.
She faced more criticism — which led to Mayor Craig Greenberg to ask for her resignation — when she promoted an LMPD major that had been accused of sexual harassment.
Humphrey joined LMPD in 2006 and has worked a patrol, been a SWAT Team member and a public housing liaison officer. He was promoted to major in 2019 and then assistant chief in 2021. He helped create the department’s Accountability and Improvement Bureau. His sister, Yvette Gentry, was interim police chief of LMPD in 2020.
Greenberg said he fully supports Humphrey and there isn’t an ongoing national search for a permanent chief. But Greenberg hasn't fully committed to Humphrey leading the department long term.
“At this point we are considering the next steps and are not ready to make any decisions,” said Kevin Trager, Greenberg's spokesperson, in an email.
If Greenberg sticks with him, Humphrey might have more time to improve LMPD than the national storyline suggests, said Ian Adams, an assistant professor in the department of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina.
Adams works with the Police Accountability and Policy Evaluation Research (PAPER) Lab, which analyzed five years of data from more than 23,000 police executives and found just 10% of police chiefs lose their job each year — making for less turnover than commonly assumed when smaller agencies are taken into account.
Adams said chiefs like Humphrey should find this data reassuring.
“My message to them is one of confidence,” Adams said. “You probably do have some time to make needed changes in this agency.”
To Humphrey, this is likely good news. He said tackling violent crime and implementing changes to the department will take time.
The changes that need to happen will come from “long-term strategies,” he said. And he said he's got some. Humphrey wants to set clear standards and expectations for officer’s performance, improve feedback and supervision of officers and build a culture of transparency, he said in a recent interview with LPM News.
“And if nobody can survive this position for that long to have these strategies go through and actually stick to them, then you're never going to make progress,” he said.
