LMPD investigation of officer who fired pepper balls at news crew unfinished 4 years later

For the moment, the scene appeared calm.

It was May 29, 2020 — the second night of mass protests over the police killing of Breonna Taylor — and WAVE-TV reporter Kaitlin Rust and cameraman James Dobson were broadcasting live in front of downtown Louisville’s Metro Hall.

Police in riot gear had recently cleared the area of protesters, and Rust was telling viewers about the supplies demonstrators had abandoned: water, food and gallon jugs of milk used to ease the effects of tear gas.

Then, one Louisville Metro Police officer broke away from his colleagues, leveled his pepper ball gun at the journalists and began firing.

“I’m getting shot! I’m getting — rubber bullets! Rubber bullets!” Rust exclaimed on air, as the officer continued firing. “It’s OK — it’s those pepper bullets. They just shot me in the shin.”

Rust was wearing a neon yellow high visibility vest and was holding a microphone. Dobson was wearing body armor marked “PRESS” and holding a camera.

That night, LMPD said the incident would be investigated. But four years later, LMPD has yet to finish its internal breach of policy investigation and Rust says she has never been contacted for an interview by the department.

The fourth anniversary of the incident passed Wednesday, not long after an LMPD officer involved in another high-profile incident — the May 17 arrest of the world's No. 1 golfer, Scottie Scheffler — was investigated and reprimanded over a breach of department policy within the span of a week.

Dusten Dean, the officer who fired the pepper balls in 2020, has seen his salary increase by more than $15,000 in the intervening four years. He has also become a detective, records show.

Dean did not respond to an email seeking comment. LMPD declined to make Dean available for an interview.

While he was stripped of his police powers pending investigation just days after the incident, they were restored in August 2023 by LMPD Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel, according to records obtained by The Courier Journal under Kentucky’s open records law. Those documents did not explain why his police powers were restored.

“What Officer Dean did was outrageous. He intentionally aimed and fired his weapon at two American journalists,” said Rust, now a public information officer with the New Orleans Police Department in Louisiana. “He showed us what intolerable policing looks like. America was founded on freedom of the press, and the press is not free when fired upon.”

Dobson, who is now a news anchor in Montana, did not respond to requests for comment. In 2022, he told LEO Weekly one of the pepper balls hit his collar bone and severed nerves leading to his left arm, leaving him without full sensation in that limb for months.

Pepper balls are similar to paint balls, but disperse chemical irritants. They are used as a less-lethal munition by law enforcement agencies, especially in crowd control situations.

LMPD declined requests for interviews about the case. In a statement, an LMPD spokesperson said: “The LMPD Professional Standards Unit investigation into the matter you are referencing is still open. To move forward, LMPD’s investigation was pending the conclusion of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the incident.”

While the case was under FBI investigation, no federal charges were ever filed.

A spokesperson for the FBI, which interviewed Rust and Dobson in 2020, referred questions about the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Kentucky. That office declined to comment.

In an interview earlier this month, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, who took office in 2023, said: “I can’t say anything about that specific case, but what I can say is that an investigation should not take four years.”

Under a new contract between Metro Government and the police union, officer discipline can be thrown out when misconduct investigations take too long. However, an LMPD spokesperson told The Courier Journal that only applies to investigations launched after Nov. 1, 2023.

Video of the incident went viral online and gathered national media attention.

In the footage, the officer can be seen firing for at least 15 seconds. At several points, he stops firing to seemingly adjust something on his weapon before resuming. Other officers can be seen looking on and walking by, but none join him — nor do any intervene to stop him.

While the Department of Justice did not specifically identify the incident in its damning March 2023 report on civil rights violations by LMPD, it did criticize the department’s treatment of journalists covering the Breonna Taylor protests.

“LMPD subjected both credentialed press and livestreamers to mass arrests and retaliatory force,” the report said. “Some officers used force against journalists who were committing no crimes, posing no safety risk, and not resisting or evading arrest. LMPD thus violated the firmly established qualified right of access for the press to observe government activities.”

The DOJ was also critical of how LMPD “routinely fails to impose meaningful consequences” in cases of officer misconduct and can take years to conduct breach of policy investigations.

Hours after Dean fired at the journalists, then-LMPD spokesperson Jessie Halladay apologized for the incident in a virtual press conference, saying the video “obviously” looks like Rust was “singled out as a reporter.”

While she said she was not sure at the time whether the officer was with LMPD, she said disciplinary measures would be taken if warranted.

That September, interim LMPD Chief Robert Schroeder told Metro Council there was “an ongoing investigation into that for policy violations” when asked about the incident.

At the time of the incident, LMPD policy instructed officers to avoid the head, neck and face when firing pepper balls “unless exigent circumstances exist.”

Later in 2020, the policy was updated to tell officers to aim pepper balls at the ground or above the heads of individuals when trying to control “disorderly or unlawful crowds.” Individuals should not be aimed at, the policy said, unless they are a threat to someone’s safety, engaged in arson or causing “serious property damage.”

To Rust, the four years without any closure is frustrating and calls into question the department’s claims that it has undergone reform.

“The people of Louisville still have not gotten an explanation. They have not gotten an apology. And they have not gotten a guarantee that this will not happen again,” Rust said.

More: Louisville spent big on a plan to boost trust in police. Much of it was never implemented

Reach reporter Josh Wood at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @JWoodJourno.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: LMPD officer fired pepper balls at news crew investigation unfinished