LOUISVILLE, KY – The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, the ACLU, and local partners launched the Seven States Safety Campaign today, filing coordinated public records requests to uncover police misconduct in Louisville, KY and six other states where the U.S. Department of Justice under former President Biden found police engaged in a pattern and practice of unconstitutional and racially discriminatory policing.
In addition to Louisville, KY, records requests were filed over the last 24 hours in Tennessee, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, Mississippi, and Minnesota– states where federal civil rights investigations and reports confirmed widespread patterns of police abuse. The Trump administration has pledged to halt federal oversight and has begun reversing course, including by attempting to rescind near-final agreements in Minneapolis and Louisville, leaving communities at risk of continued misconduct.
“Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) has a systemic, long-term, and ongoing problem of unconstitutional policing and lack of transparency,” said ACLU of Kentucky Legal Director Corey Shapiro. “The consent decree was an opportunity to repair some of the broken trust between LMPD and the community. While we understand Louisville will be implementing a voluntary version of that consent decree, Louisville Metro Government and LMPD must begin the hard work of demonstrating, through transparency and accountability, that they will do what is right, even without the Federal government’s involvement.”
From 2021 to early 2025, the DOJ launched 11 “pattern or practice” investigations into local police departments. In the seven that are the focus of this campaign, investigators found that police routinely used excessive force, targeted people of color, and violated constitutional rights as a matter of practice. Despite these findings, the seven departments continue to operate without binding consent decrees in place to hold them accountable to address these documented civil rights abuses.
“The DOJ under Biden found police were wantonly assaulting people and that it wasn’t a problem of ‘bad apples’ but of avoidable, department-wide failures,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the ACLU. “By turning its back on police abuse, Trump’s DOJ is putting communities at risk, and the ACLU is stepping in because people are not safe when police can ignore their civil rights.”
The DOJ relied on thousands of police records, thousands of hours of police videos, and interviews with police personnel throughout each department to develop their reports. The investigation into LMPD took place from 2020 to 2023 and was released on March 8, 2023. Here are excerpts from the report:
- “As one example from the hundreds of incidents that we reviewed, an officer encountered an intoxicated white woman screaming and crying while sitting on her friend’s lawn. After 90 seconds of standing back and doing nothing, the officer rushed up to the crying woman as she fought with her friends and used his boot to push her torso to the ground. […] he struck the woman’s face over and over again with his flashlight. He later called his supervisor to report the incident and explained what happened, admitting that he “beat the shit out of [the woman] . . .” (page 12)
- "[A]n LMPD officer ordered his dog to bite a Black 14-year-old even though he was not resisting. […] the officer saw the teenager lying on the ground, face down in the grass. Immediately after noticing the teen, the officer deployed his dog off-leash—without giving any warning—and ordered the dog to bite the teen at least seven times.” (page 15)
The DOJ’s investigation into LMPD was spurred by community demands following the murder of Breonna Taylor and attacks on peaceful protesters in the summer of 2020. As the federal government retreats from oversight, communities are once again stepping up to demand transparency and justice and partnering with the ACLU in this campaign.
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