Mayor's office 'very upset' U of L released unflattering police history, emails show

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg’s administration was “very upset” that University of Louisville researchers published an unflattering history of the city’s police department and spoke publicly about it, emails obtained by The Courier Journal under Kentucky's open records law show.

The city commissioned the history, written by three U of L professors, as part of its Truth and Transformation Initiative, which aimed to build trust between the police and community, in part by acknowledging harm done by law enforcement.

Despite Louisville Metro Government spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the ambitious initiative over two years, the report is one of the few parts of the reconciliation project to ever materialize.

Published in January, the report concluded police violence in Louisville was systemic across the centuries and disproportionately affected disadvantaged communities.

In a Feb. 8 email to Catherine Fosl, one of the lead authors of the history, U of L communications director John Karman wrote: “I needed to let you know that the mayor’s communication office reached out to me this evening very upset that the university has distributed the policing report and is doing media interviews about it.”

He added: “According to the mayor’s office, there was an agreement between the city and the university that there would be a joint announcement. They said they are particularly upset because the city paid the university to conduct the report, and they haven’t had time to fully review it.”

Fosl, a historian, disputed that, sending Karman a copy of a contract addendum from October 2023 that clearly stated after the report was sent to Metro Government, “U of L shall be free to disclose or publish” the report and any data related to it.

“To speak of the payment in this context suggests that they bought a set of findings,” Fosl wrote to Karman. “However, Metro assured us on repeated occasions that we possessed full academic freedom.”

According to U of L’s contract with Metro Government, the university was to be paid $10,601 to conduct the study. Of that, $3,000 would go to Fosl, $1,500 to assistant history professor Felicia Jamison, $1,500 to assistant political science professor Siddhant Issar and another $2,400 would be split between two student research assistants.

Fosl, who also authored a biography of celebrated Louisville civil rights activist Anne Braden, said it would be “an infringement of academic freedom” to not be able to discuss the report publicly.

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Greenberg spokesperson Kevin Trager told The Courier Journal the mayor's office was "caught off guard" when U of L and researchers started distributing the report.

In a May 10 interview, Greenberg said he believed there was an agreement in the contract with U of L that the report would be jointly released. However, later that day, the mayor’s office told The Courier Journal his statement was incorrect.

In an email, Greenberg's director of communications Scottie Ellis said: "Our hope was to collaborate with U of L on the distribution of the report so we could ensure the findings were the focus and the community had opportunities to engage. While we were disappointed that collaboration did not take place, we were grateful that U of L had a positive conversation with our office about how we can work together around the report going forward."

Karman told The Courier Journal in an email that Metro Government wanted to review the study before it was made public and said U of L "has a great relationship with Mayor Greenberg's office."

What did the report say?

Titled “The History of Policing in Louisville: A Fact-Finding Report on Institutional Harms,” the report determined “abusive and excessively violent interactions between police and Black people is not exceptional. Rather, it forms a consistent and systemic pattern across time, closely tied to broader issues of power and inequity.”

The report traced policing in Louisville from its founding in the late 18th century through recent years.

“Taken as a whole, comprising more than 200 years of data, this report historically tracks how accepted practices, policies, and procedures of policing — i.e., the maintenance of social order and public safety — in Louisville has adversely and disproportionately affected Black, Brown, working-class, poor, immigrant, queer, and disabled communities,” the report said. “Instead of looking at instances of police violence as aberrations perpetuated by rogue individual officers, we locate these instances as systemic, lying within the broader structure of policing as it unfolds in relation to a specific historical and socio-political context.”

The history closed out by recounting The Courier Journal’s reporting on “Slushygate,” the incidents spanning 2018-19 in which LMPD officers in unmarked vehicles threw drinks at pedestrians and filmed their exploits.

Speaking to The Courier Journal, Greenberg said: “The more people that read it, the more that will help us achieve our goal of improving relationships. I’m a strong believer that people need to understand history. History is not full of stories that we always want to hear.”

The report made several recommendations to improve policing in Louisville and "change the longstanding pattern of institutional harm":

• That LMPD cannot fix itself.

• That “democratic mechanisms must be developed to provide transparency and accountability between the police and those they serve” to break the “blatant unaccountability” for officers that has been “a consistent through-line across the history of policing in Louisville.”

• That at least some officers be required to live in the communities they police.

• That rather than increasing police budgets every year, Louisville redirect money to “comprehensively cover the economic, social, education, and health needs of vulnerable communities in Louisville.”

• That monetary compensation be given to victims of police abuse and communities that have faced “intergenerational harm at the hands of the police.”

• That the DOJ’s scathing 2023 report on LMPD be “taken seriously — not as an end, but as a starting point.”

Mayor, report authors trade accusations

In the report, the authors wrote there were limitations to their report, as “Louisville Metro Government (LMG) requested an earlier date for the final study.”

After it published, Fosl told Louisville Public Media that Metro Government asked for the report “eight months earlier than we had originally agreed to give it to them.”

A week after that interview, Greenberg was asked about Fosl’s statement at a press conference.

“The accusations that our administration denied an eight-month extension request are simply false. They are not true. As a matter of fact, we were asked for a two-month extension, which was granted. So, any assertion to the contrary that the city is trying to rush someone’s work is simply false. We gave these researchers more time than they were contracted to, to do their work,” he said.

Speaking to The Courier Journal this month, Greenberg doubled down, saying it was "incredibly misleading" to suggest researchers were "forced" to "publish a report without enough time under the contract."

In a response to written questions from The Courier Journal, Fosl and another report author stood by the timeline.

“Though the [U of L]-Metro contract set the end date as October 31, 2023, it was made explicit verbally in the monthly remote planning and update conversations we had with Metro in April, May, and June 2023 that the history study would continue into the spring of 2024,” Fosl said.

She added: “Until late October, it was our assumption that we had more time than just 2023. And it took a truly Herculean effort to get the research finished and report written by that December 2023 deadline Metro gave us in late October.”

Jamison corroborated Fosl’s account, saying Metro Government "emphasized" a Spring 2024 due date in meetings.

Both said after they turned in the report on Dec. 31, 2023, they did not hear anything from Metro Government for several weeks. Both also stressed they were not speaking on behalf of the university.

The third report author did not respond to The Courier Journal.

In her February email to Karman, Fosl said researchers "had no reason to suspect that Metro had any plans to engage [the report] whatsoever. To the extent that someone defaulted on the agreement, it was Metro, which failed to enact several elements of it (listening sessions, LMPD archives). Their oblique message to us was they were discontinuing the Truth and Transformation Initiative of which this history was one part."

According to a “scope of work” document included in the contract , researchers were to have access to Truth and Transformation listening sessions with the community to assist in data collection. However, those listening sessions — a central part of the initiative — never occurred.

According to a July 2023 status update from the National Network for Safe Communities — the organization hired by Metro Government to help guide Truth and Transformation — the history's completion was dependent on city government and police granting access to data.

If the university accepted the mayor’s office’s “flawed statements,” that there was an agreement to jointly release the report, Fosl wrote to Karman, that "merely sustains that administration’s pattern of a lack of transparency.

"To do so ultimately sustains the wrongful culture of local policing that has long plagued this community and cost too innocent people — disproportionately Black people — their dignity, their freedom, indeed their lives."

Reach reporter Josh Wood at jwood@courier-journal.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @JWoodJourno.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: University of Louisville history of city police upsets mayor's office