the justice department has just issued a scathing and disturbing report on the louisville police department nearly two years after a nearly two year civil rights investigation. now, attorney general merrick garland launched this probe in the months after the louisville police shot and killed an unarmed black woman, breonna taylor inside of her home. a short time ago garland explained that that botched raid in march of 2020 was part of a practice of abuses by the city. the pd leader told the department breonna taylor was a symptom of problems that we have had for years. the justice department s findings in the report that we are releasing today bear that out. and listen to this, these are just some of the very ugly examples that garland cited today. the justice department has also identified deficiencies in lmpd s response to and investigation of domestic violence and sexual assault. lmpd has relied heavily on pretextual traffic stops in black neighborhoods. some have vi
department is routinely violating the law, routinely violating their own policies and really creating an environment that poll rates those sort of violations and, you know, bad behavior on the part of their officers. it s important to point out, though, abby, each one of these investigations, even one like louisville where we ve seen some significant findings, even if it s just a small percentage of the sworn law enforcement workforce in louisville, the bigger concern here is that they were able to do these things for such a long period of time and really not receive any consequences from their own management and leadership. people knew this was going on and did nothing about it. so really the goal of these pattern and practice investigations is to restructure the way the department supervising their law enforcement officers to ensure they find acts of, you know, poor behavior and violations of law and take care of them immediately so they don t let that stuff persist.