Louisville Metro has entered a federal consent decree after 10 months of negotiations with the United States Department of Justice. The document lays out a roadmap for policing reform that the city is required to complete. The agreement will be overseen by federal judge Benjamin Beaton and an independent monitor.
“This agreement reflects [Louisville’s] commitment to action and sets us up on a path to keep making rapid improvements and be in full compliance in five years or less, half the time that other cities have taken,” Mayor Craig Greenberg said at a press conference Thursday.
The consent decree is the end result of the DOJ’s in-depth investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department, which began after the high-profile police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020. A report released in March 2023 outlined a variety of unconstitutional and racially discriminatory policing practices by the department and detailed several harrowing cases of excessive force by officers.
Speaking at the press conference, Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, also enumerated some of the problematic behaviors and patterns the DOJ documented. She highlighted that they found Louisville police used excessive force, carried out unlawful stops, searches and arrests, engaged in discriminatory policing and violated protesters’ free speech rights.
“Our standing together today makes clear that Louisville and the United States share the goals of promoting public safety, ensuring constitutional policing and strengthening trust between community and law enforcement,” Clarke said at the press conference.
LMPD Chief Paul Humphrey acknowledged Clarke’s comments, but said he would rather define police by their best — not worst — moments.
“When you look at the success of consent decrees over the years, consent decrees are successful because of leadership, not because of the words on the paper,” Humphrey said, adding that city leaders are dedicated to getting it right.
Throughout the negotiation process, Greenberg administration officials said they wanted to avoid a deal that would hamper the police department’s ability to enforce the law and arrest criminals. Greenberg also expressed concerns that some cities that have entered into consent decrees have found them hard to get out of years later, when city officials feel like they’ve met the terms of the deal.
Community activists recently put pressure on the Greenberg administration to sign the deal before former President Donald Trump begins his second term in January. Trump’s DOJ during his first term in office was skeptical about federal police reform mandates. Activists argued that LMPD can not be trusted to reform itself and that federal intervention is necessary to rebuild trust.
Louisville joins a list of 13 other cities, large and small, that are under a federal consent decree, including Baltimore, Seattle and Meridian, Miss.
What the agreement requires
The consent decree includes hundreds of requirements for how LMPD must change, add to or continue existing policies. Some of the policy changes reiterate existing law — like requiring officers not lie on search warrants applications — or create new internal structures for accountability and transparency.
The consent decree specifies a number of updates and changes to LMPD’s use of force policies including requiring officers to use less force as the “threat diminishes,” consider if a person may have a disability or mental illness that would keep them from complying with police orders and limit force against handcuffed or restrained people. It also bans officers from “using force for punishment” and requires officers carrying guns to also carry a “less-lethal” weapon like a stun gun or pepper spray.
Another required policy change is that LMPD must limit when officers can use weapons. Use of police dogs, for example, factored into some of the troubling incidents laid out in the initial DOJ report. The decree lays out four levels of force and requires the department to review each use of force and hold officers accountable for violating department policy.
The agreement specifies how investigations of police misconduct must be handled. Lack of “meaningful” repercussions for officer misconduct was a significant concern in the 2023 DOJ report, and the consent decree requires LMPD to come up with revised policies that “ensure consistency” in how officers are disciplined. It also requires that police take civilian and criminal complaints more seriously.
The DOJ also found that LMPD conducts illegal searches based on faulty warrants that lack probable cause and contain faulty information. In response, the consent decree requires LMPD to create new policies around what must be included in a search warrant, namely “specific, individualized, and accurate facts,” and not “information they know to be materially false or incorrect.”
Another policy change related to faulty warrants would update oversight procedures, requiring a supervisor to review them and requesting review from a prosecutor before submitting the application to a judge.
In an effort to address discriminatory policing practices, the consent decree requires that LMPD create a policy prohibiting targeted traffic enforcement in specific communities “based on the demographic composition of the area or on demographic characteristics or income.” It also prohibits police from using formal or informal quotas for stops, citations or arrests and prohibits officers from displaying symbols that are “sexist, racist, vulgar, or indicate affinity with any person or organization that advocates hatred, oppression, or persecution of any person or group.”
Similarly, the decree seeks to prohibit retaliation against protestors and civilians exercising their rights to free speech, requiring LMPD to create policies around use of force and arrests during protests. And it limits when an officer can stop a person from recording officers as they work.
That’s just a taste of the myriad policy changes and training requirements the 248-page consent decree puts in place. The decree also requires extensive data collection and analysis, to determine the impact of the various policy changes. For example, LMPD will have to start regularly analyzing data on their stops, pat-downs, searches and more to measure if officers are still engaging in discriminatory policing practices. If the data shows they are, LMPD will take “appropriate Corrective Action.”
The consent decree also requires that data become publicly available upon request, with some exemptions under the state’s open records law.
LMPD and Louisville to ‘self-assess’ oversight alongside monitor
The consent decree is designed to automatically expire after five years — by contrast, some consent decrees in other cities have required more than double that time. To extend it, the consent decree would require the Department of Justice to prove the police department has failed to maintain “substantial compliance.”
The agreement also gives the city and police department the power to “self-assess,” rather than relying solely on the input of an outside monitor, although the court has the discretion to determine if LMPD maintains that capability.
“Prioritizing this from the outset enables Louisville Metro and LMPD to build a solid foundation for long-term success, mitigate risks, foster a strong ethical culture, and enhance operational efficiency,” the agreement reads.
The decree does allow for independent oversight in the form of a monitor, who will provide “technical assistance” and will conduct a “comprehensive reassessment” in two and a half years and then again every two years. Under the automatic five-year expiration date, that would presumably be only two reports.
The decree also only puts the monitor in place for two years, after which the court will evaluate whether to renew the monitor’s appointment for another two years “or until the Consent Decree is terminated, whichever happens first.”
After a monitor is selected, which could take months, the city and police department will develop a one-year plan. The agreement creates a timeline for a back and forth between federal authorities, the independent monitor, police and city to finally agree on a plan to submit to the court.
The decree states Louisville Metro will pay a court-appointed monitor a maximum of $1.475 million per year for their initial two-year term for performing all of their duties.
“This overview will include a specific schedule and deadlines for the upcoming year and a general schedule for successive years,” the decree reads.
The agreement requires the city to hire or “reassign current LMPD employees” to create a staff to implement the consent decree, along with a liaison to work between all of the various stakeholders in the agreement.
Who is the judge in charge?
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton in Kentucky’s Western District. President-elect Donald Trump nominated Beaton in 2020, and was confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate just after an election in which Democrats regained control of the chamber.
Beaton is a contributor to the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization that advocates for an “originalist” interpretation of the U.S. constitution. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Beaton clerked for former U.S Court of Appeals Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a George H. W. Bush-appointed judge, and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Beaton has ruled on a few high-profile cases since his appointment. In 2022, he ruled against Louisville’s anti-discrimination ordinance, which aimed to protest LGBTQ+ residents, saying it violates a photographer's religious freedom rights. He also more recently sided with Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, deciding that a Biden administration rule requiring states to create goals for reducing highway tail-pipe emissions was “arbitrary and capricious.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting and to clarify language.
