Mayor Greenberg sat on U of L report on police abuse. He can't fix Louisville PD.
I hate to be Mr. Obvious here, but maybe a mayor who got ticked off when University of Louisville professors released a report outlining a history of abuse by Louisville police isn’t the right guy to fix the problems outlined in that report and the one released a year ago by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Maybe the guy who sat on the report for a month and then disputed its findings isn’t the right one to look deeply into what we have long known to be problems with policing in Louisville and make the changes that we have needed for generations.
Maybe Mayor Craig Greenberg was never the right guy.
Or maybe something in him changed when a troubled young man walked into his campaign office and fired a gun point blank at him and missed. Maybe he came to rely on police too much then and is paralyzed when it comes to standing up to them now.
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But it’s clear that under Greenberg, the changes to the department are going to come painfully slow, if they come at all.
And that’s not acceptable.
Mayor Greenberg has failed
He’s got a department that is out of control and a chief who he won’t hold accountable.
He’s got a community that doesn’t trust its police and a department that can’t hire enough officers likely in part because of the fraught relationship between the police and the people they’re supposed to protect.
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It’s hard to trust the department after the city was torn apart by the death of Breonna Taylor in 2020. It turned out the initial explanation of the shooting was a bunch of hooey and that police officers were largely to blame for the screwed up raid on her apartment.
That didn’t come on Greenberg’s watch, but he’s the guy stuck with cleaning up the mess left behind.
He’s failed so far.
Greenberg didn’t do anything when Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel didn’t tell the truth when she testified in a case that involved a police chase and said she wasn’t wearing a body camera when she arrived at the scene.
She was.
She just didn’t turn it on.
And that seems to be a recurring theme with LMPD.
Officers weren’t wearing cameras when they entered Taylor’s apartment.
And they weren’t wearing them when a member of the Kentucky National Guard, working under authority of the LMPD, shot and killed David “Yaya” McAtee back in 2020.
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LMPD botched PGA golfer Scottie Scheffler's arrest
More recently, Gwinn-Villaroel announced Thursday that Detective Bryan Gillis violated department policy when he didn’t turn on his body cam during his interaction with professional golfer Scottie Scheffler in which Scheffler was arrested the morning of the PGA Championship’s second round.
When will they learn?
And now, instead of taking decisive action in the wake of the Scheffler arrest or having even a modicum of transparency, Greenberg is doubling down with his “back the blue” mentality and saying little more than he’s going to let it play out in court.
He held a press conference on Thursday in which he never explained why Scheffler was charged with a felony for something that looks more like a traffic violation. He never explained why it appears no officers involved in the arrest had their body cameras turned on.
Gwinn-Villaroel didn’t even explain what the two videos, which captured little of the officers’ interaction with Scheffler, actually showed.
And neither of them answered a single question.
The problem of how Louisville polices its citizens has been an issue for generations.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the LMPD following the shooting death of Taylor found that the department has historically reacted violently in situations when it wasn’t called for and that African Americans often bear the brunt of the violence.
The other report, by U of L historians, was titled “The History of Policing in Louisville: A Fact-Finding Report on Institutional Harms” and was commissioned by the city as part of the Truth and Transformation Initiative, which was intended to repair the relationship between police and residents following the Taylor shooting.
That report found that “abusive and excessively violent interactions between police and Black people is not exceptional. Rather, it forms a consistent and systemic pattern across time, closely tied to broader issues of power and inequity.”
According to the paper’s authors, the Greenberg administration rushed them to finish the report before their work was completed. The Courier Journal’s Josh Wood reported that other parts of the Truth and Transformation Initiative were allowed to wither and die.
And then the administration seethed that the historians who wrote the report had the audacity to release their findings and talk about them.
Meanwhile, Greenberg blathers on about wanting Louisville to have the “most trained, trusted and transparent police department in America.”
It’s not going to happen. Not when the mayor and the police department work overtime to undermine that transparency.
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Greenberg ignored DOJ, U of L report. He can't fix Louisville police
