Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg has named two finalists who could be the city’s independent police reform monitor: Effective Law Enforcement for All, or ELEFA, and 21st Century Policing Solutions.
The selected group will be tasked with overseeing the city’s local police reform plan, known as the Community Commitment, which Greenberg and the police chief unveiled in May. It includes most of the reforms the U.S. Department of Justice wanted to impose on the city as part of the federal consent decree, before President Donald Trump’s administration pulled out of the agreement.
Greenberg told reporters last week that ELEFA and 21st Century Policing Solutions were selected as finalists out of a pool of “several” applicants “from around the country.”
“Both of them have been involved in processes like this before, they’ve served as independent monitors in other cities that have had consent decrees under the U.S. Department of Justice,” he said. “So, both are incredibly qualified.”
The monitor will be responsible for evaluating the police department’s progress in implementing the reforms outlined in the Community Commitment. They include hundreds of changes to policy and training aimed at addressing what the DOJ highlighted in its 2023 report: that LMPD routinely violated residents’ civil rights, particularly Black residents’.
The monitoring team will also be expected to review policy and training, as well as data on police activities like traffic stops, arrests and search warrants. And they’ll release semiannual progress reports to the public.
Before Greenberg and his staff select a monitor, they’re inviting residents to hear from the finalists at a meeting Monday at the Republic Bank Foundation YMCA on West Broadway starting at 6 p.m. The city will open an online feedback form for 24 hours after the meeting.
To help residents prepare for the meeting, LPM News interviewed both finalists about their experience and approach to changing policing.
21st Century Policing Solutions
Charles Ramsey, Sean Smoot and Roberto Villaseñor founded 21st Century Policing Solutions in 2015. All three had served on former President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Smoot, who is the chairman of the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board and a former police union leader, told LPM the founding partners wanted to help local agencies take a more community-centered approach to policing.
“Having served together on President Obama’s task force really gave us some solid background in police reform,” he said.
Both Ramsey and Villaseñor have extensive law enforcement experience, with Ramsey being the former head of police departments in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia and Villaseñor serving 35 years with the Tucson Police Department, including six years at the helm.
Since its founding, 21CP Solutions has served as an independent monitor for the federal consent decree in Baltimore. Its staff have also been on monitoring teams in Cleveland and Seattle.
Smoot said the group has experience consulting with various police agencies, including smaller university police departments, which are interested in “collaborative reform work” outside of the federal consent decree process.
Some of 21CP Solutions’ past clients include South Bend, Ind., where they evaluated the police department’s practices in six core areas, including use-of-force and bias, and the University of California-Los Angeles, where the group conducted an investigation into the police handling of pro-Palestinian protests in 2024.
He said although Louisville’s reform effort started under threat of a consent decree, he believes Greenberg’s Community Commitment plan shows “the parties involved … are cooperating and pulling the oars in the same direction.”
Smoot said 21CP Solutions expects to take a collaborative approach to reform in Louisville, similar to what they’ve done elsewhere.
“It’s a city that knows it needs help, a police department that knows it needs help and a community that knows it needs help,” he said. “It’s about getting those parties together and figuring out what works in terms of public safety.”
Smoot said that 21CP Solutions strongly believes that success in the independent monitor role depends on “good community-centered relationships,” as well as buy-in from the police department and government leadership.
“Just as we want everyone in the community to feel that they’re safe in public places, we also need officers to feel safe,” he said. “That’s a really important part of this as well, and I think we’ve been very successful … in bringing community and cops together.”
21CP Solutions recently reviewed how local police handled a neo-Nazi rally in Evendale, Ohio, near Cincinnati. Some community members and activists, mostly from a nearby village called Lincoln Heights, criticized the report for largely backing the police response.
Smoot called what happened in Evendale “horrible” and noted that the report did highlight areas where 21CP Solutions said there was room for improvement. Still, he said the company stands by its report.
“We were hired to do an assessment and assessments aren’t guided by politics or what people want to hear,” Smoot said. “If they were, we wouldn’t get hired very much. We call balls and strikes.”
If selected, Smoot said 21CP Solutions plans to do thorough community engagement around the reform process, holding town halls and partnering with community groups. He said they’ll also meet with residents individually, if they want to talk.
Their proposed monitoring team would be headed by Steven Dettelbach, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio and head of the ATF from 2022 to 2025.Ronald Davis, the former director of the DOJ’s COPS Office and head of the U.S. Marshals Service, will serve as deputy monitor.
The rest of the team would include:
- Sean Smoot
- Charles Ramsey
- Hassan Aden, former chief of the Greenville, N.C. Police Department and former strategic site liaison for the DOJ in Louisville
- Eve Gushes, former deputy chief for the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform for the Chicago Police Department
- James Whalen, former chief of the University of Cincinnati Police Department
- Jeff Asher and Ben Horwitz, data analysts with AH Datalytics
- Matthew Barge, civil rights attorney and former monitor in Cleveland
- Emily Gunston, former deputy chief of the Special Litigation Unit within the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ
Effective Law Enforcement for All
David Douglass cofounded the nonprofit Effective Law Enforcement for All in 2020.
He is currently the deputy monitor overseeing the federal consent decree in New Orleans, Louisiana, a position he’s held since 2013. Douglass told LPM News that after seeing the changes being implemented in New Orleans and other police departments across the U.S., he felt he could do it “a little bit better.”
“There seemed to be such a sense that the public and police were at odds about policing,” Douglass said. “What I found was the police were just as critical of bad policing as the public is.”
Douglass said he felt that a more collaborative approach to transforming policing could lead to better results.
“If we could get these two sides to talk to each other, if we could educate the public so they would understand what good policing looks like, then they'd be better partners and they could engage collaboratively with their police departments to make policing work better for everyone,” he said.
ELEFA’s first monitoring role was serving as the auditor for the Reimagining Public Safety Initiative in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. The reform process was self-initiated — Montgomery County Police were not under a federal consent decree.
After working with the police department, the public and county officials, ELEFA released its final report in 2022. Among other things, they recommended Montgomery County Police invest more in its early warning detection system that tracked complaints against officers and urged supervisors to conduct regular, random audits of body-worn camera footage.
More recently, ELEFA was selected to be the independent monitor in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after the city reached a settlement agreement with the state to implement a series of police reforms.
Douglass said what attracted ELEFA to the opportunity to oversee Louisville’s Community Commitment was that it wasn’t a federal consent decree. He said consent decrees can take a long time and cost a lot of money.
“They're also kind of inherently coercive, and they tend to be very critical of the police,” he said. “So by the time you start the reform process, there's sort of a lot of frustration built up.”
Douglass said ELEFA doesn’t want to focus on the history and where the department was.
“I just think it's a quicker path and it lays a better foundation to just really focus on not so much who the department was, or the history,” he said. “Let's just start it where we are, how it compares to what we want policing to look like. On those things, I don't find that the police and the public really disagree.”
Douglass said ELEFA puts an emphasis on community engagement and education. In Minneapolis, the group has held multiple community meetings to provide residents with updates on police reform implementation.
ELEFA has faced pushback from some activists in New Orleans, who have accused Douglass and the nonprofit of having a conflict of interest.
Douglass continues to be deputy monitor in New Orleans, overseeing police reform, while ELEFA employs former New Orleans Police Department leaders. A cofounder of ELEFA split from the group last year, citing the alleged conflict of interest and “other ethical and integrity issues,” according to The Times-Picayune.
Douglass told LPM News he doesn’t believe there was ever a conflict of interest, since the former officials weren’t employed by New Orleans PD when they joined ELEFA.
"We employ subject matter experts, but we're a civilian-led organization,” he said.
If selected, ELEFA’s monitoring team in Louisville will be led by Michael Harrison, the former New Orleans Police Department commissioner. Harrison also headed the Baltimore Police Department while it was under a federal consent decree.
Other members of the team, according to Douglass, would include:
- Eric Melancon, a former police leader in Baltimore and New Orleans
- Sheree Briscoe, a former deputy police commissioner in Baltimore
- Brian Corr, the past president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement
- Lisa Fink, who worked on policy and training for the Baltimore consent decree
- Julie Solomon, a clinical social worker specializing in criminal justice and behavioral health
- Laura Wyckoff, a researcher specializing in evidence-based policing practices and training
- Marcia Thompson, an attorney who’s worked in federal law enforcement agencies
