March 13, 2025 marks five years since Louisville Metro Police Department officers killed 26-year-old emergency room technician Breonna Taylor in a middle-of-the-night raid at her apartment.
Taylor’s killing sparked a summer of protests in Louisville demanding justice and sweeping changes in policing. Some of the thousands of people who participated in those demonstrations marked the anniversary with a press conference at City Hall.
Shameka Parrish-Wright, a protest leader who now represents District 3 on Louisville Metro Council, said she’s still waiting on promised policing reform half a decade later.
“I don't think we've achieved police reform at this time,” she said. “I think that they've made attempts, which is why I said that I was thankful for the family of Breonna Taylor. The things [the city] started to do was because of what they asked for in their pursuit for justice.”
Parrish-Wright, along with J.P. Lyninger, a fellow Democrat from District 6, recently reintroduced a resolution that calls on city leaders to “publicly acknowledge the institutional harms inflicted by, and existing discriminatory culture within LMPD.” The proposal also calls for more public input in the police reform process.
Metro Council members quashed a similar version of the resolution last June, voting 17-4 against it. The current version has received similar pushback, with Metro Council members raising concerns about legal liability and conflicts of interest at a committee meeting last week.
But Lyninger and Parrish-Wright said Thursday they plan to move forward.
“The first step toward healing is acknowledging harm,” Lyninger said. “That’s what this is about.”
Dozens of activists and community organizers stood behind Lyninger and Parrish-Wright during the press conference. In the crowd was Bianca Austin, Taylor’s aunt.
Austin spoke briefly, choking up as she asked people to remember Taylor’s mom, Tamika Palmer, on this day.
In a post on Facebook, Palmer said she continues to be frustrated with the people who lied about her daughter’s character and never took “real accountability.”
“Breonna was the one murdered physically, but me, I was murdered mentally and emotionally,” Palmer wrote. “So to you Breonna, I love you with everything in me and I only pray you felt that.”
Austin, meanwhile, said she planned to gather with residents and community leaders in Jefferson Square Park, dubbed Injustice Square by protesters, at 3:13 p.m. for a moment of silence.
“If y’all ever heard a mother cry out for the loss of her daughter, with no answers, take that moment of silence today,” she said.
Austin said the thing activists have been demanding since Taylor’s death is accountability.
Yet despite the passage of time and various attempts, accountability and sweeping police reform still elude Louisville.
Immediate consequences
In September 2020, after months of protests, Louisville residents braced for what a state grand jury would say about whether the officers involved in the raid on Taylor’s apartment should face criminal charges. The result: No one was held directly responsible for her death.
Former LMPD detective Brett Hankison was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment for shots he fired that night that traveled into a neighboring apartment. A jury found Hankison not guilty in 2022, but in federal court, where Hankison faced separate charges, he was found guilty last year of depriving Taylor of her constitutional rights.
The other officers who fired their guns at Taylor’s apartment no longer work for LMPD, but have not faced criminal charges.
There’s just one criminal case related to the raid on Taylor’s apartment that’s still unresolved. Two former LMPD detectives, Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, are facing federal charges for violating Taylor’s right against unlawful search and seizure, as well as falsifying records and lying to the FBI.
One of the earlier actions taken by city officials in response to Taylor’s killing was a total ban on no-knock warrants.
Dubbed Breonna’s Law, the ordinance barred LMPD from requesting warrants that did not require them to knock and announce themselves before attempting to enter a home. Police obtained a no-knock warrant for the raid on Taylor’s apartment in 2020, though some officers said they did knock and identify themselves before entering.
Breonna’s Law also introduced new local regulations on the use of body cameras, requiring LMPD officers to wear and activate their body cams any time they participate in executing a search warrant. The officers at Taylor’s apartment did not have body cams, because their unit did not require them.
Metro Council unanimously approved the ban, despite opposition from the local police union, three months after Taylor was killed and weeks into the mass protests.
Advocates in the movement seeking justice for Taylor were less successful at the state level, where Republicans held a supermajority in the Kentucky General Assembly.
In 2021, on the last day of the legislative session, state lawmakers passed a bill limiting the use of no-knock warrants, but not banning them entirely. The bill still allowed police to request a no-knock warrant in cases of alleged violent crime and emergency situations. It required additional supervisor approval, as well as the use of recording devices during raids and having paramedics on standby.
Attica Scott, a Democratic state representative at the time who was arrested during the social justice protests, voted in favor of the bill, but said that she didn’t think it was enough.
“It gets us closer to justice, but this ain’t it,” Scott said after the vote. “I voted ‘Yes’ because daughters like mine deserve a chance to live without wondering if they will be next.”
Comprehensive policing reform in Louisville
In response to calls for dramatic changes within LMPD, then-Mayor Greg Fischer, a Democrat, ordered an independent audit of the agency.
The resulting 2021 report, produced by the consulting firm Hillard Heintze, found a department “in crisis.”
“The Department needs to make major changes — some immediately,” the report stated.
Investigators found LMPD made a disproportionate amount of contacts with Black residents, stopping their vehicles and conducting field interrogations. The department's relationship with Black communities was “deeply strained” as a result, they said.
The report also noted a need for more de-escalation training, better processes for handling complaints and discipline against officers and improved search warrant application practices.
Many of these same issues would subsequently be addressed in a report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ began investigating LMPD in April 2021, after Taylor’s killing and the resulting protests and once Democratic President Joe Biden took office.
Like the Hillard Heintze report, the DOJ issued a scathing review of LMPD’s practices in 2023, shortly into Democratic Mayor Craig Greenberg’s term. It detailed numerous incidents of excessive force, First Amendment violations and racial bias. Federal investigators concluded LMPD had a pattern or practice violating residents’ civil rights.
Last February, Louisville Metro and the DOJ began negotiating a consent decree, which would bring federal oversight to the city’s reform process. The final agreement, which was signed late last year, acknowledged some of the city’s existing work. That included the creation of a 911 deflection program, which provides a non-police response to some calls about people experiencing mental health crises, implementing a new system for identifying problem officers and improving its training around de-escalation.
But the consent decree — which city leaders including Mayor Craig Greenberg agreed was necessary to transform LMPD — is now in limbo.
The federal judge assigned to oversee the consent decree has not yet given it final approval, and he’s signaled he’s skeptical of this method of reform. And Republican President Donald Trump’s administration has said it may want to review the agreement, which was signed in the waning days of Biden’s presidency.
Greenberg and LMPD Chief Paul Humphrey have said they plan to implement the reform measure included in the consent decree with or without federal oversight, although they may not see eye-to-eye with some community groups on exactly how to do that.
On the fifth anniversary of Taylor’s killing, Greenberg released a statement reiterating that.
“Working together with Chief Humphrey and our community, we will continue to move forward in a new direction — committed to public safety, transparency and accountability,” he said.
National backlash
Taylor’s death at the hands of police, as well the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, fueled the racial justice movement in 2020. There were nationwide protests, removals of Confederate statues and calls to reexamine racial equity in policing, media and the workplace.
These attempts to address long-standing inequities, however, appear to have fueled other, more conservative movements. For several years now, American politics have tilted toward rejecting the policies that were adopted following the events of 2020.
In 2021, there were laws banning critical race theory in the classroom. Then the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled affirmative action in university enrollment. More recently, companies have started backing off of or eliminating initiatives to diversify their workforce.
In Kentucky, the General Assembly appears poised to pass a bill that would eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion offices at public universities, with lawmakers calling DEI “social engineering.”
The push to claw back policies focused on social justice and racial equity have been almost as fervent as their implementation in the wake of the 2020 protests.
