Louisville police has pattern of violating constitutional rights, DOJ finds

From the Louisville Courier Journal:

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the findings of a sweeping investigation of Louisville Metro and Louisville’s police department Wednesday, the result of a nearly two-year probe following the killing of Breonna Taylor.

The investigation, announced in April 2021 after nearly a year of protests over Taylor’s killing at the hands of LMPD officers, aimed to assess “all types of force” used by local police, including potential violations of the First Amendment, whether the department engages in discriminatory policing and whether it worked in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The report laid out violations that had been found in the department during the 2020 protests and during unrelated events, including traffic stops that disproportionately targeted Black residents to training sessions that exhibited racial bias.

The DOJ report on its two year long civil rights investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department is out. DOJ found LMPD officers use excessive force, execute illegal search warrants, make unlawful arrests, and discriminate against Black people and mentally ill people pic.twitter.com/EYSGHelosk

— Roberto Aram Ferdman (@robferdman) March 8, 2023

From Vice News:

The second part of our investigation focused on LMPD's narcotics unit, which for years used residential search warrants to target predominantly Black neighborhoods in Louisville. We showed how money and drugs frequently go missing after LMPD police raids. https://t.co/Ybmep4cRpT

— VICE News (@VICENews) March 8, 2023

Here’s a more thorough look at what was included in the report.

At the press conference, Garland said the U.S. Department of Justice and the city of Louisville had agreed to negotiate a consent decree to establish a reform.