A federal judge has thrown out Louisville’s proposed court-supervised police reform settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice after the department withdrew its support earlier this year, a decision that affects how reform efforts would have been overseen. U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton issued the dismissal in a Dec. 31 ruling, according to The Associated Press.
The Justice Department had announced in May that it was canceling proposed consent decrees with Louisville and Minneapolis that were designed to curb alleged racial bias and abuses by police in the wake of the 2020 killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the protests that followed. In the Dec. 31 order, Beaton said the responsibility for leading the Louisville Metro Police Department in compliance with federal law must remain with the city’s elected representatives and the people they serve, the AP reported.
Beaton’s ruling did not foreclose reform work, the AP said. The judge wrote that his decision “doesn’t prevent the parties from undertaking the hard work of reform themselves,” according to the reported language from the order.
The federal case grew out of a multiyear Justice Department investigation into Louisville, prompted by the fatal shooting of Taylor and by police responses to public protests in 2020, AP reported. A draft of the investigation was released in early 2023, alleging that the Louisville Police Department “discriminates against Black people in its enforcement activities,” uses excessive force and conducts searches based on invalid warrants, according to the AP account.
Justice Department officials under President Joe Biden’s administration ultimately approved the consent decrees with Louisville and Minneapolis in the final weeks of the Biden administration, but the settlements still required judicial approval, the AP reported. The case then shifted when new DOJ leadership said the prior administration had relied on flawed legal theories to evaluate police departments and pursued reforms that would be costly and burdensome through consent decrees.
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said after DOJ’s withdrawal that the city would keep pursuing reform, AP reported. The city created a local police reform plan and hired an independent law enforcement consulting group as a monitor, and Greenberg said that some progress in 2025 included addressing a backlog of open records requests and making police shooting body camera videos public within 10 business days, according to AP.
In a statement Friday, a spokesman for the mayor said Greenberg 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 AP reported. The AP account also said Louisville initiated some reforms after Taylor’s death in March 2020, including a city law banning the use of “no-knock” warrants, which were typically used in surprise drug raids.
The AP reported that the city also started a pilot program sending behavioral health professionals to some 911 calls. It also reported that Louisville paid a $12 million wrongful death settlement to Taylor’s family.
The Taylor case has also continued in criminal proceedings. Earlier this year, former Louisville Police Detective Brett Hankison became the first officer involved in the Taylor raid to go to prison, AP reported. The AP said a judge sentenced Hankison to nearly three years in prison on an excessive force conviction despite efforts by the Justice Department to reduce his sentence to one day of time served, and it reported that Hankison shot 10 rounds after police were fired on by Taylor’s boyfriend from inside her apartment, including that Hankison shot into Taylor’s windows but did not strike anyone inside or in a neighboring apartment.