Property and Policing in Louisville, KY

The Root Cause Research Center is comprised of tenant organizers who produce knowledge and data in solidarity with tenants under threat of dispossession. We work primarily in the US South on base-building and structured campaigns to build collective tenant power. A large part of our organizing work involves identifying and documenting the forces that create houselessness and dispossession. Policing, surveillance, and nuisance laws are major components of houselessness all over the globe. 

This story map investigation documents Louisville’s nuisance law, and how the forces of nuisance and placed based policing were complicit in the murder of Breonna Taylor. We look at nuisance law through the historical lens of what scholar Ananya Roy calls “structures of colonial and racialized policing” (Roy, et al , 2021).

In January of 2021, in response to an Open Records Request, the Root Cause Research Center received a dataset of Louisville Metro Government's nuisance violations from the beginning of 2017 through the end of 2020. This storymap examines this nuisance data in the context of a large-scale market-rate development project in Louisville's Russell neighborhood and shows how the mayor's office rapidly employed the concept of Place Based Investigation (PBI) to hyper-criminalize Black personhood, resulting in the murder of Breonna Taylor.

As  documented  by journalist Jacob Ryan of the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (KyCIR) in late 2019, Louisville’s public nuisance ordinance has been in place for decades. But, in October 2018, the Louisville nuisance ordinance was amended to expand the list of reasons a property could be considered a public nuisance. These reasons include misdemeanor crimes such as possession of drug paraphernalia, theft, and domestic violence. Around this same time, Louisville Metro Government’s ‘Vision Russell’ initiative leveraged funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Choice Neighborhood Grant to increase surveillance in the Russell neighborhood. According to Ed Blayney, Louisville Metro Government’s Civic Technology Manager, this included the installation of at least 35 state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in 2019. Throughout 2019, Blayney published  two Medium articles  where he attempted to dress up increased policing as innovation, and label Russell residents, who didn’t support increased police camera surveillance, as “detractors” (Blayney, 2019).

This expanded police power in surveillance and nuisance abatement resulted in a sharp increase in public nuisance cases, with 84% of those cases occurring in Louisville’s predominantly Black western half, which includes the Russell neighborhood (Ryan, 2019). In the 6 months following the amendment, there were 148 nuisance cases, compared to 89 cases in the previous 6 months; a 65% increase. The increase in nuisance cases had direct correlations, both in time and geography, with land transfers  for market-rate development happening in the Russell neighborhood.

Our analysis reveals that the forces of property and police converged in Russell to acquire the remaining property for the redevelopment of Elliott Ave through the collaboration of the Louisville Metro Develop Louisville Office and the Louisville Metro Police Department’s (LMPD) Placed Based Investigations Squad (PBI). Increased pressure from the Louisville Mayor's Office to acquire these properties led directly to the rapid employment of PBI. The PBI Squad, then, employed a concept they were barely familiar with, to create the false evidence needed for the "No-Knock Warrant" that lead to the murder of Breonna Taylor.

We also want to acknowledge, in the same way we acknowledge indigenous land, the legacies of settler colonialism and plantation enslavement which created the generational wealth of the Southern ruling class. In a 2020 article titled  Jackie Robinson Stadium: Prisoners Made Here , Ananya Roy calls this legacy “Stolen Lives and Stolen Land," that lives in the gentrification and racial banishment occurring in large cities across the world.

Racialized violence in Kentucky is rooted in Black dispossession, starting with mob violence and later legitimized through the state apparatus of policing. In his history of lynching in Kentucky, historian George C. Wright notes that most of the violence against Black people occurred “not because of supposed criminal activities but rather because of economic and social ones,” mostly involving land and removing Black people from land using violence. Wright concludes that “The most surprising aspect of my research on racial violence in Kentucky concerns the numerous instances of whites forcing blacks to leave their homes and land” (Wright, 1990, p. 10).

Before the Civil War, Louisville played an important role as a market hub for the sale of enslaved humans in the US internal trade, with the largest market located at Second St and Market St, directly across from what is now known as Whiskey Row. This role highlights the interconnectedness of whiskey and enslavement in Louisville’s early economy (Hudson, Aubespin, & Clay, 2011). Although the plantation system was formally abolished after the Civil War, in Louisville, the southern ruling class held onto power through structural-institutional reproduction of what Charles Tilly called "durable inequality" (Tilly, 1998). In their work on enslavement and school segregation, Reece and O’Connell note that “places reproduce inequality across generations by mapping social categories onto hierarchical power relations. This hierarchy is maintained through a process called opportunity hoarding, whereby the dominant group develops a virtual monopoly on a valuable resource or a method of resource acquisition” (Reece & O’Connell, 2016). In plain language, the old plantation power structure maintained, and maintains, political power by holding onto land.

Following the Civil War, many high-ranking Confederate officers fled the Union-occupied South and migrated to Louisville, KY, where they formed what Wright called a “Confederate Supremacy” positioning themselves as the city’s elite political class. “Nearly all of Louisville’s journalists, lawyers, realtors, and merchants were former rebels,” Wright wrote (1985). These former Confederates quickly established a system of control that reproduced the old plantation power structure in an industrial economy. Wright describes the Louisville ruling class, who controlled the Black population after the Civil War, this way:

 "Like their counterparts in the Deep South, Louisville whites had no qualms about resorting to violence to suppress Black aspirations for changes. The difference was that Louisville whites always made sure that it was done legally by the police. In Louisville the police force was an ever-present symbol of white authority reminding African-Americans to remain in their place and that any attempts to change the racial status quo would be met with resistance (Wright, 1985, p. 76).”

The historical residue of settler colonialism, plantation slavery, and the Confederacy are embodied in Louisville's Brown Family, who own the Brown Forman whiskey distillery and are listed as the 20th wealthiest family on the Forbes list of US wealthiest families. They are the wealthiest family in Kentucky, with a combined net worth of $12.3 billion (Hopkins, 2016). The Browns have a history deeply rooted in land acquisition through settler colonialism, plantation enslavement, and the Confederacy, as noted by the US Department of the Interior:      

“J. T. S. Brown & Sons was one of Louisville’s oldest and strongest wholesale whiskey and distilling firms, with roots that were deeply planted in Kentucky’s history. J.T.S.Brown’s father, William Brown, and William’s brother Patrick left Hanover County, Virginia, in May 1782 and moved into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, joining their brother James at Harrodsburg. There they were involved with George Rogers Clark in early campaigns against the Indians. William Brown subsequently returned to Virginia and married Hannah Street, also of Hanover County. They returned to Kentucky and settled near Elizabethtown, where they farmed a large tract and owned a large number of slaves. Their son, J. T. S. Brown, moved to Munfordville, where he engaged in business and served as postmaster for more than fifty years. When the Civil War broke out, he became a major in the Confederate army” (US Dept of the Interior, 1998).

Brown-Forman began selling whiskey in 1870 with its first product, Old Forester Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which is rumored to be named after Confederate general and Klu Klux Klan grand wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest (Carson, 1963). The company survived Prohibition because one of the founders was a pharmacist who had a license to sell whiskey during that period; they have since become a global power in the whiskey market (Hopkins, 2016). The Brown Family is also instrumental in shaping urban redevelopment in Louisville over the past decade, with Brown family heiress and philanthropist Christy Brown funding a number of projects, including an urban greening project with the University of Louisville that was renamed the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute (EI) after a $5 million donation from her family’s foundation. The EI is currently conducting an experiment on residents in a South Louisville neighborhood to measure the health impacts of tree plantings in what they call an “urban laboratory.” By using an experimental group of community members who will receive tree plantings, and a control group who will not, the EI extracts medical information such as blood and urine samples, and other health data from residents to measure the impacts of trees on health (UofL, 2019).

Meanwhile, in a 2015 CityLab article, Christy Brown’s son-in-law, Gill Holland, a real estate developer, was dubbed the “Godfather of New Louisville'' for his role in developing the area directly east of downtown (Grabar, 2015).

"His first project was on the opposite side of downtown, in an area then known as Louisville’s skid row. Beginning in 2006, he raised $13 million to renovate and rebuild several blocks of East Market Street. The transformation has been, by all accounts, stunning. The neighborhood has acquired a trendy nickname, NuLu (''New Louisville''), and added dozens of businesses and hundreds of jobs” (Grabar, 2015). However, the transformation of NuLu did not occur without the large-scale displacement of low-income residents and the erasure of a historic neighborhood.

In 2013, with the expansion goals of NuLu in motion, Holland turned his attention towards the Portland neighborhood, an area immediately west of downtown and just north of the Russell neighborhood, where he announced plans to raise $23.5 million for his Portland Investment Initiative (Grabar, 2015). With this move, Holland laid the groundwork for future investment in Louisville’s West End, and in turn, local government was able to leverage philanthropic and public capital for the development of Russell, which borders the Portland neighborhood to the south, including the $30 million Choice Neighborhood grant from HUD, and large scale public investment in market-rate housing. Metro named the HUD project “Vision Russell” and the market rate housing project “Russell: A Place of Promise.”

The first major funder for the Russell: A Place of Promise (RPOP) project was the North Carolina-based Kenan Charitable Trust, which made a $5 million donation to the city in May of 2018. Like the Browns, the Kenan family are another plantation dynasty with deep roots in the Confederacy and histories of racial violence:

"According to an 1850 slave census, the Kenan family owned 49 people, including 23 people aged 10 or under (Calcaterra, 2018)." The family patriarch, William Sr, was the bloody-handed monster who led a white-supremacist paramilitary force that murdered scores of Black people in what became known as the Wilmington Massacre in 1898. Most recently, the family came under scrutiny for the patriarch’s role in the massacre, resulting in his name being removed from various buildings at the University of North Carolina in 2018 (AP, 2018).

These historical power dynamics cannot be divorced from present-day Louisville, where over the past decade, the city’s owning class launched multiple real estate projects in the city's urban core, culminating in a massive wave of urban redevelopment and gentrification led by a coalition of philanthropy, private capital, and local government. At Gill Holland's invitation, The Congress for New Urbanism held their annual conference in Louisville in 2019, describing it as a place where “New Urbanism meets the New Bourbonism” (Congress for New Urbanism, 2018).

When the Louisville Metro Council  voted  to expand Louisville's nuisance ordinance in October 2018, the intention was to focus on businesses. But, in implementing the new ordinance, LMPD and the Department of Codes and Regulations were "increasingly focused on residential locations where crimes are reported — regardless of whether the victim or the offender lives there" (Ryan, 2019). The ordinance stipulated that at least two police interactions were required for a property to be declared a nuisance, but code enforcement officers were issuing letters declaring a property a nuisance on the first interaction, and encouraging the owners to evict tenants to defend the violation

Jacob Ryan explained the new process; "For renters, this has huge ramifications: after LMPD asks Louisville Metro Department of Codes and Regulations to issue a nuisance violation, its office sends a registered letter to property owners. The letter says the property has been deemed a public nuisance, and offers a defense: evict the tenants within 75 days" along with a threat that the property owner could be charged "up to $1000 per day." These letters also included threats of utility shutoffs and orders to vacate should the nuisance not be abated.

There is no formal process for declaring a property a public nuisance in Louisville. Whatever process exists, it occurs within the interpersonal relations between the Louisville Metro Department of Codes and Regulations and the LMPD. Codes and Regulations supervisor Jerimy Austin estimated that half of all nuisance violations resulted in evictions; however, we found forcible detainer filings for less than 5% of nuisance violations, suggesting that forcible detainers drastically under-represent how many evictions actually occur.

Since Louisville Metro does not track nuisance cases or abatements, there is no way of knowing how many of these cases ended in evictions. We also found that any interaction with police can result in a nuisance violation, completely at their discretion. There is no requirement of a criminal charge being filed, or a conviction.

In response to Ryan's 2019 investigation, LMPD and Louisville Codes and Regulations defended the ordinance process. At the time, "Codes and Regulations Director Robert Kirchdorfer said the nuisance ordinance is key to addressing problems for residents who live near homes with criminal activity. People might begin to reevaluate their lives if they’re forced to move every time they get in trouble, Kirchdorfer said." LMPD spokesperson Jessie Halladay called the ordinance "a creative and important tool" that goes beyond merely "locking people up" (Ryan 2019). 

In February 2020, Ryan published a follow-up article about changes implemented in response to public pressure related to the article, but the changes were largely cosmetic and not substantive. Codes and Regulations would no longer suggest evicting tenants and threatening $1,000 per day fines in their letters and would follow the rules of the ordinance, requiring 2 police interactions before declaring a property a nuisance. However, "property owners are still subject to fines, and eviction is still a defense under the ordinance. Changing that would require action from the Louisville Metro Council." Although Louisville Metro Council members were "incensed" at the application of the ordinance, they took no action to change it. (Ryan, 2020). LMPD made a statement in which they declared that no changes would be made in how the ordinance was implemented. Breonna Taylor would be murdered by the LMPD less than a month after Ryan's follow-up article was published.

This map shows the density of nuisance violations, with the 26th Street corridor in the Russell and Portland neighborhoods having, by far, the highest concentrations of nuisance violations in the city, with other lower concentrations occurring in Smoketown and the Taylor-Berry area next to Churchill Downs. All are undergoing redevelopment, with nearly $1 billion worth of investment in Russell alone.

Beginning in 2015, two years after Gill Holland's investment in the Portland neighborhood started, the Louisville Metro Government launched a campaign to eliminate the historic “9th Street divide” that separated Louisville’s downtown from the majority Black West End. Louisville Mayor, Greg Fischer, repeatedly promoted this effort in Russell, restating the $1 billion in investment over and over again. Russell: A Place of Promise and the Kenan Charitable Trust commissioned national journalist Soledad O’Brien to do a lengthy promotional feature on the project for her television show, Matter of Fact, titled  America’s Cities: Russell Rising as Citizens Build Their Own Path  in 2019 (O’Brien,2019).

On March 13, 2020, 26-year-old ER technician and Black Louisville resident Breonna Taylor was murdered in her home by the LMPD. Initially, the story and circumstances surrounding her death received little local or national attention. However, beginning in May after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd and subsequent uprising across the United States, Breonna’s case became well known and resulted in a Louisville youth uprising that lasted throughout the summer.

On July 5, 2020, the legal team in Breonna Taylor’s case filed court documents alleging that the search warrant issued for her house originated from an LMPD effort to aid in the gentrification of Louisville’s West End neighborhoods. According to Phillip Bailey and Tessa Duvall from the Louisville Courier-Journal, “Lawyers for Taylor’s family allege in court documents filed in Jefferson Circuit Court Sunday that a police squad—named Place-Based Investigations—had “deliberately misled” narcotics detectives to target a home on Elliott Avenue, leading them to believe they were after some of the city’s largest violent crime and drug rings” (Bailey & Duvall, 2020).

Two days later, on July 7, Christy Brown of the Louisville Brown family published an  op-ed  in the same newspaper about the Breonna Taylor murder, saying that she was “greatly concerned about the new accusations in the July 6 Courier-Journal about the LMPD and allegedly different set of circumstances leading up to the murder of Breonna Taylor. I pray those accusations are not true, but there can be no justice for Louisville, for Breonna, until we know'' (Brown, 2020).

Using nonprofits for “community outreach" to establish trust and extract information with communities is a common tactic of “community policing.” This methodology is rooted in counter-insurgency tactics first deployed overseas, and later used against targeted communities in the United States. From a 2014 journal article, John Zambri writes that “law enforcement has been looking at military experience and application of successful counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, methods and strategies to merge with community policing methods in an effort to identify, localize, manage and, where possible, eliminate these threats.” In 2013, Louisville Metro Government created the Office of Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods (OSHN), a community policing model, with the stated purpose to “mold neighborhoods that support every citizen from prenatal – through – education – to – career.” In response to a PBI  survey  conducted in Feb 2020, OSHN responded that their outreach efforts, “can be complimentary, [but] cannot be directly related or linked to PBI,” giving some insight about how OSHN interacts with LMPD.

The first director of OSHN, Anthony Smith, left in 2015 to take over as CEO of Cities United, based in Washington D.C., and now leads the RPOP initiative, along with Theresa Zwacki, another Metro employee. From their grant application, “Community engagement has already begun with the goal of developing relationships and connectivity with RPOP, and Cities United.” According to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, “Through partnerships with the state, non-profits have also been deputized as an extension of the police state to extract information for the purpose of criminalizing and banishing people” (Stop LAPD Spying 2021). On a recent panel from the  Police Executive Research Forum , called “ Managing Demonstrations: New Strategies for Protecting Protesters and the Police ,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison talks about the importance of incorporating community activists to “play a pivotal role” to manage and control dissent. 

In July 2018, Louisville Metro Government entered into a  2-year contract  with Keeping it Real Neighborhood Institute, Inc. (KIR) for $110,000. As shown on Exhibit C to this Agreement as “the Project Area”, one of the project goals was to expand "programming into west Louisville, and more specifically into portions of the Russell neighborhood by providing support for current and future residents of Elliott Avenue. " The "Project Area" is the 2400 - 2500 block on Elliott Ave.

The project deliverables included:

1. Quarterly Property and Activity Reports
2. Community outreach meetings
3. Property acquisition, maintenance and stabilization

KIR's outreach efforts included "Quarterly Property  and Activity Reports ” related to Project Coordination and Data Collection." According to these reports, KIR’s job was to establish contact with residents on Elliott Ave and extract information from them to "collect and provide Metro with data related to parcels and residents within the Project Area, including but not limited to occupancy status, assessment of tenant and/or owner needs, referrals to Metro or external programs, and progress toward Project Area goals." KIR also held quarterly meetings with the following offices during this time: Office of Vacant and Public Property Administration, Property Maintenance Division - Codes & Regulations, Office of Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods, the Office of Redevelopment Strategies, and LMPD.

In these  quarterly reports , KIR and Louisville Metro Government discussed efforts to secure development funding for the project and documented meetings with Wells Fargo, PNC, Republic, and Chase Banks. KIR's primary contact with Louisville Metro during this time was the Office of Redevelopment and Vacant & Public Property Administration (VPPA). Over the course of the contract, KIR provided more detailed information to Metro related to property acquisition, demolitions, and crime. Their work also included engaging the  University of Kentucky College of Design  to create a  design plan  for Elliott Avenue, highlighting the complicity by academia and the design profession in dispossession and development-driven policing.

The concept of Place Based Investigations (PBI) was introduced to LMPD  by Dr. Tamara Herold at a meeting of the Society of Evidence Based Policing Meeting in Cincinnati, OH in May of 2019. The model is based on a program called  Place Based Investigation of Violent Offender Territories (PIVOT)  in Cincinnati. PBI focuses on how crime can be removed from an area through the design and management of places, or by disrupting what Dr. Herold calls, "toxic networks of places and neighborhoods." Dr. Herold found most police efforts focus on sites where crimes occur, in contrast, she identified 4 types of places in what they call the "place networks" that "ultimately serve as the infrastructure for crime activity.” PBI theory is a multi-faceted approach where police work with multiple city departments to control, disrupt, and remove these places and networks (Herold, 2017). The 4 location types identified in the place network are:

1. Crime sites: where the crime is occurring
2. Convergent locations: public space where offenders might congregate (such as a street corner)
3. Comfort locations: private space controlled by offenders (such as a home)
4. Corrupting spots: business that generates crime elsewhere (such as a convenience store)

Dr. Herold first met with the LMPD Command staff and the Mayor's office in June of 2019 to discuss the PBI concept. Over the next several months, senior LMPD and Louisville Metro staff would meet with Dr. Herold and her team to learn more about implementing the concept. In an  LMPD summary  document released in early 2020, LMPD said that “violent crime concentrates across places, victims, and offenders. The key to long-term crime reduction is to dismantle the entire physical infrastructure, or place networks, used by offenders."

LMPD's Placed Based Investigations (PBI) unit began operating in January 2020. According to internal files, PBI units were focused specifically on two areas in Louisville, one being Elliott Ave and the 26th Street corridor. In February of 2020, PBI conducted a  presentation  for all Louisville Metro Government department heads, coordinated by Joshua Watkins, of the Mayor's Office. After the presentation, Watkins conducted a  survey  of various department leaders within Metro Government about how their work could support PBI. Over forty  surveys  were returned and none of them were critical of the PBI initiative, suggesting a high level of internal support from other Metro Government Departments including the Office of Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods and the Center for Health Equity.

Shortly after midnight on March 13, 2020, Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove, of the  Louisville Metro Police Department  (LMPD), forced their way into Breonna Taylor's apartment. Believing the officers were intruders, Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who was licensed to carry a firearm, shot at the officers who fired over 20 shots in return, hitting Taylor 8 times and killing her. Breonna's home was included in the signed "no-knock" search warrant because LMPD's PBI squad said it was part of a crime-network used to receive packages. A suspect was allegedly seen walking into Taylor's apartment one January afternoon with a USPS package before leaving and driving to 2424 Elliott Ave. The warrant stated that a US Postal Inspector confirmed that the man had been receiving packages at the apartment. However, Postal Inspector, Tony Gooden, has said that his office had told police there were no packages of interest being received there. Joshua Jaynes was later fired by LMPD for lying to obtain this warrant (Roldan, 2021).

Breonna Taylor's home was 10 miles away from 2424 Elliott Ave. In the events leading up to her murder, there are clear patterns of surveillance, lies and violence against Black bodies in out-of-control gentrification projects. PBI logistics identified Breonna Taylor’s home as a "Comfort Site" in their place network theory. We question the basic assumptions of PBI and see it as a dangerous tool of development that hyper-criminalizes personhood and relationships, as well as public and private space through what the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition calls “speculative policing,” which they describe as “policing based on mass suspicion and wholesale criminalization of communities and places” (Stop LAPD Spying, 2021).” 

We also see evidence of a coordinated real estate development effort involving multiple partners applying pressure to acquire properties on Elliott Avenue. This increased pressure resulted in employing PBI in 2019 to escalate police surveillance and violence to acquire property on and around Elliott Ave and remove poor people as barriers to market-rate development. In PBI theory, residents living near a crime location are "facilitators" and part of crime "infrastructure" even if they're unaware that the crime is occuring. In 2018, Dr. Herold talked about the relationship between PBI and redevelopment on the  Reducing Crime  podcast: “What’s great [about PIVOT] is that if you’re looking to revitalize a part of your city, one of the worst conditions that exists is that it's unsafe. And if you’re able to stabilize a location by removing that infrastructure, it gives the city a chance to search for investments and other people who might be interested in taking over those spaces.”

This investigation also revealed suspicious tactics on the part of LMPD and Louisville Metro Government to use nuisance cases to acquire properties and evict tenants. Most of the nuisance violations in Louisville were for drug possession charges, primarily involving marijuana (Ryan, 2019). It is well known that police plant evidence on drug offenders. In the last two weeks alone, Baltimore awarded  $230,000 settlement  to man shot by city police who argued police planted a gun (November 3rd, 2021) and a judge  dismissed a case  in Staten Island following a NYPD drug planting allegations (Marshall Project 2021).

Our analysis also found that many of these nuisance violations involved cases where drugs were discovered on the outside of someone's home; in interviews, multiple residents in Russell accused LMPD of planting drugs on suspects to make arrests. One of our  open records requests  found that LMPD Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, as part of the Narcotics Unit, received over $200,000 for “investigative funds” between 2018 and 2019. This money was used for “narcotic buys and informant fees,” and only the LMPD Chief has access to Mattingly’s purchase receipts. Although we found other LMPD officers obtaining money for "Investigative Funds," none of the amounts were close to the $200,000 Mattingly received.

We also received evidence from a Russell resident who filmed LMPD officers suspiciously leaving a vacant property near Elliott Avenue.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer issued the following statement about the accusations from Breonna Taylor's lawyers and the connection to the redevelopment on Elliott Ave:

“They are insulting to the neighborhood members of the Vision Russell initiative and all the people involved in the years of work being done to revitalize the neighborhoods of west Louisville,” Metro spokeswoman Jean Porter said in the statement. “The mayor is absolutely committed to that work, as evidenced by the city’s work to support $1 billion in capital projects there over the past few years, including a new YMCA, the city’s foundational $10 million grant to the Louisville Urban League’s Sports and Learning Complex, the Cedar Street housing development, new businesses, down payment home ownership assistance, and of course, the remaking of the large Beecher Terrace initiative.”

Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, Fischer’s top economic adviser at the time, called the allegations in the lawsuit a “gross mischaracterization of the project.”

“The work along Elliott Ave is one small piece of the larger Russell neighborhood revitalization and stabilization work we’ve been doing for years,” she said in a statement. “We have partnered with a community organization to understand community needs and wants, and the public land bank has been acquiring properties through foreclosure, donation and some sales; less than half the homes there are occupied. We have also been in conversation with nonprofit housing interests about using the publicly acquired properties to create Louisville’s first community land trust to ensure investment without displacement. Our goal is to provide a safe, clean, desirable and affordable neighborhood for the residents of Russell.”

Following the accusations, the Mayor's Office released a Project Overview of the Elliott Ave project, including a map of the properties Metro had acquired in the area. However, this new project description was nearly identical to the previous one (from November 2019), except for the omission of one sentence in the opening paragraph, "The Office of Community Development (OCD), in partnership with the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department (LMPD) continue to explore crime reduction measures on Elliott Avenue with an emphasis on place-based crime prevention strategies."

During our investigation, we mapped these properties and updated their ownership status. Although the properties on Elliott Ave are "Reserved" and not for sale, Metro has sold a number of the surrounding properties since July 2020, including 2 properties on 26th Street sold to Develop 26 LLC, owned by Donnie Adkins, who worked for Louisville Metro from 2015 to 2018 as a Housing Program Supervisor over the City’s home rehab department. On the Vision Russell  website , Adkins is still listed as Metro's staff contact for the Russell Homeownership Incentive Program. A list of foreclosure requests from Metro shows that Adkins requested foreclosures on 27 properties in Russell between August 31st and November 24, 2020 (ORR #21-5644).

When, while describing PBI in 2018, Dr. Tamara Herold said “if you’re able to stabilize a location by removing that infrastructure…”, her use of the word infrastructure is doing a lot of work. It’s coded language. What she means is that by removing the people... by destroying established relationships and social connections (no matter how small, innocuous, or visibly innocent), the city is given an excuse (what they call an opportunity) to take advantage of the destabilization of lives and relationships (via police terrorism and threat of fines and litigation) to benefit developers and investors; the property-owning class within the plantation colonial system whose oppression we experience in Louisville.

Under PBI logic, in this insidious process of destabilizing lives and relationships, homes are made vulnerable to police terrorism and city harassment by sheer social or physical proximity to illicit economies (i.e crime or illegal activity). 

In the case of Louisville, most of the nuisance violations are for drug possession charges, primarily involving marijuana. Nuisance abatement, combined with PBI, not only criminalizes the possession of marijuana, but also criminalizes the people, the relationships, and the places nearest to that activity. This sets up a logic of “speculative policing” that anyone (whether living in the area or not) can and could be punished for activities which  they may not even be aware of happening within their social network or near their physical location (Stop LAPD Spying, 2021). Dr. Herold confirms, in the interview, that knowledge of criminal activity occurring is irrelevant to crime complicity under PBI logic. For her, any person that creates convenience, comfort, or ease for an “offender” (whether deliberate or not) makes them culpable and categorically a significant person who may need to be---in her words---“taken out.” 

This logic of criminalizing alleged convenience, comfort, and ease, for the community living on Elliott Avenue, also positions Black freedom from pain and constraint as an internal threat to our own personal safety because it is an external threat to the city’s development goals and the ability of the overarching ruling class to get richer through the dispossession of our land and property. 

Herold’s interviewer on the Reducing Crime podcast even offered “grandma’s house” as an example of a comfort space---which she concurred---making grandma a significant person in what Dr. Herold would call a “facilitator” of criminal activity under PBI logic. 

Breonna Taylor’s home was classified as a comfort space even though her physical proximity was questionable. She lived 10 miles away from where LMPD said crime was happening but her friendly relationship with a person that police had identified as an “offender” was enough to justify the brutality and excessive force that led to her murder on March 13, 2020. 

These weighted, dehumanizing, and hyper-criminalizing terms: Facilitator, Infrastructure, Offender, and the like, are effective tools within the PBI logic. These tools influence how police officers and city officials think and treat poor and working-class communities. Studies show that when dehumanizing language is consistently used to describe a group, people exposed to that language are more likely to tolerate and even participate in aggressive and violent treatment of that group. By setting up this coded system of language, PBI logic is able to attack the personhood of people living in and connected to low-income neighborhoods. 

The language attacks our personhood by normalizing the denial of our humanity, dignity, and inherent value as people on this earth. When we are othered and reduced to villainized tropes and stereotypes, it becomes socially and civically acceptable, reasonable, or even just, to treat us like objects or animals with little to no consideration, compassion, or empathy. The use of subtle dehumanizing language affects the cognitive processes of its users and significantly alters their judgment. 

Keeping in mind that racism and classism existed in the practices and procedures of city development and policing long before Metro Louisville Government adopted Herold’s methodology, it's important to note that the PBI system of logic builds on and expands those deadly biases, deplorable politics, and growth of class hatred. The PBI system of thinking and doing provides fertile ground, false legitimacy, and camouflage for white middle- and upper-class fear and hate of non-white people and poor and working-class people and spaces. This fear and hate fuels decisions made about our communities and has for centuries.

The suspicious PBI tactics on the part of LMPD and Louisville Metro Government using nuisance cases to acquire properties and evict tenants cannot be swept under the rug. They need to be examined, documented, and addressed with serious consequences for the devastation of our communities. PBI works to criminalize our lives and relationships, as well as the spaces that we occupy in order to make areas more marketable for developers and investors. This PBI, a racist and classist system of investigation, needs to be eliminated, roots and all, before it's sickness and depravity take any more Black lives.