Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg would not commit on Tuesday to signing a consent decree on police reforms with the U.S. Department of Justice before the new administration of President-elect Donald Trump takes over on Jan. 20.
The long wait in finalizing the consent decree — along with Trump’s victory last week — has worried police reform advocates in the city, as the former president’s first administration largely abandoned utilizing the process.
Under President Joe Biden, the DOJ released a scathing investigative report in March 2023, finding the Louisville Metro Police Department has an extensive pattern of violating people’s civil rights, especially Black residents.
The DOJ sent a draft consent decree to Louisville officials this February. While both sides kept the draft confidential, such consent decrees typically involve an agreed order between the city and DOJ on police reforms, with a federal judge overseeing their progress along with an independent third party monitor.
After the draft was delivered in February, Greenberg said the consent decree negotiations and police reforms were an “urgent priority.” This June, Greenberg said he hoped the consent decree would be finalized by early fall.
Asked Tuesday if he would sign a consent decree before Trump is inaugurated or wait until new DOJ personnel take over with a new administration, Greenberg said their active negotiations with the DOJ continue “with urgency” this week and every day, but declined to say whether he would sign it.
After a follow-up question asking again if he would commit to signing a consent decree with the DOJ before the turnover in administrations, Greenberg instead spoke of the principles guiding their negotiations. Those include the need for meaningful reforms to improve the culture of LMPD, as well as the need for public safety to improve along with declining gun violence.
Greenberg added any consent decree the city agrees to “must have specific performance measures, and it must have a clear exit path once sustained compliance is met with those performance measures.”
“Those are the three things that we have told the DOJ from the very beginning. Those are the three things that are guiding us. We have made significant progress. We are continuing to work with diligence every day on this,” he said.
Amber Duke, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, said she hopes that Greenberg and LMPD leadership “would keep their promise to the community to see this through.”
She noted that the public has not been a part of the city’s negotiation process, and “the only official word that I have heard recently is from LMPD's police chief that negotiations were in their final stages.”
While many are “curious about or sort of bracing for what might potentially happen in the next (Trump) administration,” Duke added that “It is my sincere hope that they will continue to follow through with this process. I think the community demands that, and has been demanding that for some time.”
Under Trump’s first administration and attorneys general, the DOJ largely ended interventions against police misconduct in cities, with officials criticizing consent decrees as heavy-handed federal interventions into local matters. That was a stark contrast from the DOJ under former President Barack Obama and the Biden administration that followed Trump.
The 90-page DOJ report on LMPD after its two-year investigation in 2023 found police committed inappropriate uses of force, conducted flawed internal investigations, used no-knock raids with invalid search warrants and disproportionately targeted Black residents.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
