Judge dismisses Louisville police reform deal tied to Breonna Taylor

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A federal judge in Kentucky dismissed Louisville’s proposed settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice covering police reforms, saying the city’s compliance responsibilities must stay with elected representatives. In a Dec. 31 ruling, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton wrote that “the responsibility to lead the Louisville Metro Police Department in compliance with federal law must remain with the city’s elected representatives and the people they serve,” after the DOJ withdrew its support for the plan earlier in the year.

The settlement had been pursued after the Justice Department announced in May that it was canceling proposed consent decrees with Louisville and Minneapolis. The DOJ framed the cancellations around concerns from new leadership that federal officials had advanced flawed legal theories and pursued consent decrees that would be costly and burdensome for police departments.

The Louisville case was linked to a multiyear investigation that the Justice Department said was prompted by the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor and by police responses to public protests in 2020. A draft of that investigation was released in early 2023, with allegations that the Louisville Police Department discriminates against Black people in its enforcement activities, uses excessive force, and conducts searches based on invalid warrants.

The proposed consent decree with Louisville—approved by the DOJ in the final weeks of the Biden administration—still required judicial approval to take effect. Beaton’s dismissal, according to the reporting, did not prevent the parties from pursuing reforms outside the consent-decree structure, and he wrote that the decision “doesn’t prevent the parties from undertaking the hard work of reform themselves.”

The case also reflected an earlier parallel outcome in Minneapolis. A separate judge in May dismissed Minneapolis’ proposed consent decree, which would have placed a federal officer in charge of tracking progress on reforms laid out in that agreement.

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city would continue to pursue reform after the DOJ withdrawal, including efforts it said it started after Taylor’s death in March 2020. In particular, the city created a local police reform plan and hired an independent law enforcement consulting group as a monitor, while the mayor’s office pointed to 2025 progress such as addressing a backlog of open records requests and making police shooting body camera videos public within 10 business days.

A spokesman for Greenberg said in a statement that the mayor is “committed to ongoing reforms” and “did something no mayor in the country has done — he voluntarily created and implemented” Louisville’s own reform plan. The statement also referenced city actions including a law that banned the use of “no-knock” warrants, which the reporting said were typically used in surprise drug raids, and a pilot program that sends behavioral health professionals to some 911 calls.

The case has also continued to reverberate through criminal proceedings involving officers tied to the Taylor raid. Earlier this year, former Louisville Police Detective Brett Hankison became the first officer involved in the raid to go to prison; a judge sentenced Hankison to nearly three years after an excessive force conviction, despite DOJ efforts to reduce his sentence to one day of time served.

According to the same reporting, Hankison shot 10 rounds after police were fired on by Taylor’s boyfriend from inside her apartment. The report said Hankison shot blindly into Taylor’s windows but did not strike anyone inside or in a neighboring apartment.