As homicides soar to record numbers, Louisville still lacks firm plan to stop the violence

It's official — 2020 has become the most violent year in Louisville’s history.

With four people killed in two hours Friday night into Saturday morning, the city surpassed its 2016 record of 117 homicides investigated by Louisville Metro Police in a single year.

To date, 121 people have died violently this year — with 100 days yet to go.

Nearly all of the year's homicides have been fatal shootings. In addition, more than 400 people have been wounded by gunfire, police records show.

Taken together, they produce a grim statistic: A person is shot in Louisville about once every 12 hours.

The official LMPD count does not include three homicides investigated by other Jefferson County police departments, five people killed this year in what authorities later deemed "justifiable" homicides, and four people killed by law enforcement — including Breonna Taylor and David McAtee.

It also does not capture the countless families, many in the West End, traumatized by the year's unrelenting violence.

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And as city officials grapple with COVID-19 and civil unrest fueled by racial injustices, some observers say Louisville leaders have not done nearly enough to stem the bloodshed.

"We're not going to see the numbers do anything but go up from year to year until you do some kind of radical intervention," said Eddie Woods, co-founder of Louisville-based No More Red Dots, a nonprofit working toward violence reduction. "What we're doing is not working, and we can't arrest it away."

Local leaders agree that pandemic-related circumstances — including joblessness, children not in school and limited community resources — contributed to this year’s rampant shooting violence, both in Louisville and around Kentucky.

They also agree that a multi-agency effort is needed to make systemic changes that will reduce violence in the long term.

But while there are sporadic efforts, including some budding local-federal partnerships and efforts to improve affordable housing opportunities, little else has changed since last year, critics say.

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A patchwork of local nonprofits, including No More Red Dots, Game Changers and Pivot to Peace are — and have been for several years — involved in violence prevention and interruption in the city.

Yet, none of those groups get funding from the city anymore.

“The coordinated efforts have never truly been there," said Christopher 2X, founder of Game Changers, a nonprofit that focuses on early violence intervention and support for shooting victims and their families. "I’ve been a part of these efforts for nearly two decades.”

Multiple plans to address gun violence that Louisville Metro Government and grassroots organizations have attempted since the city and county government merged in 2003 have fallen short of any serious tangible results, 2X said.

And that won't change until there's a better effort, Metro Council President David James told The Courier Journal.

“Without opportunities and a living wage, it’s just a breeding ground for gang activity and violence,” James said. “People go into survival mode, and survival mode is not pretty, especially when there’s a prevalence of guns everywhere.

“But that doesn’t get changed or fixed overnight.”

'Horrifying increase'

The new year was about six hours old when the city recorded its first homicide: David Mulinda, 28, found shot to death in the Valley Station neighborhood.

Eight other homicides were reported in the first month, doubling last January's total and setting an ominous start to the year.

The pace has been blistering ever since, with homicides reaching double digits in all but one of the next seven months.

Roughly 41% of this year's homicide victims as of Sept. 13 were younger than 24. That figure was 46% for shooting victims under 24.

The youngest was an unborn child, killed when her pregnant mother, Amber Ray, 35, was shot dead on Poplar Level Road July 2.

Mayor Greg Fischer, at a Sept. 8 press conference during which he named two new leaders in the Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods, said the city has to act to prevent more senseless deaths.

“We have to address the horrifying increase in homicides that we’re seeing in our city, many of which are connected to the illegal drug trade,” Fischer said.

More coverage:Fischer announces new leadership for Louisville's Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods

Reducing the number of homicides and shootings "remains a top priority" for Metro Government, Fischer spokeswoman Jean Porter said in a statement Friday. The Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods is “redoubling" its prevention and intervention efforts, she added.

That includes expanding its focus by offering race-based trauma training and engaging members of the religious community to establish a faith-based approach to reducing violence, Porter said.

The office's community outreach coordinators will also work with a "clergy resource team," a separate group of faith leaders that'll work with communities and families victimized by violence.

"We're talking about re-imagining public safety, and a part of it has to be that we re-imagine and redefine how we discuss and how we develop interventions for violence prevention," said Monique Williams, the office's incoming director and the former director of the University of Louisville's Youth Violence Prevention Research Center.

"Understanding how patterns of violence are connected to social systems and social customs is really key to the equation," she said.

The office's budget, however, has been slashed significantly for three consecutive years and is now largely funded by federal grants. Those grants aren't guaranteed from year to year.

Funding has been cut by nearly a third since 2018-19, when the office's budget was $3.6 million. About $3 million of that came from  Metro Government and $600,000 from grants.

This year, the budget for the office is $2.4 million, down about $500,000 from last year. Slightly more than half of that funding is from a federal grant, and the rest from Metro Government.

James said the city's plan to slow gun violence includes efforts to increase access to affordable housing — a collaboration with Develop Louisville, Metro Government's development arm — understand the role of systemic racism and address redlining in housing issues, both of which are being done through Metro Council legislation.

But there won't be progress unless the mayor decides to talk about the homicides — to embrace the problem, James said.

"He's run from it for years," James said. "And it's one of the failures of his administration."

James said the mayor controls the police department and all other local government agencies. Fischer is the one with the power to do more, he said.

"I don't remember the last time the mayor mentioned homicides at all," said Metro Councilman Anthony Piagentini, R-19th, adding that while police reform is important, the homicide problem is imminent.

"Someone bring me the reform that's going to stop the murders," he said. "Where's that plan?"

"If someone had a Band-Aid or immediate approach, we would have done it," said Metro Councilwoman Jessica Green, D-1st, who is also chairwoman of the public safety committee. "There are systemic issues as to why we’re here, and it’ll take the entire system to put it back together again."

Louisville Metro Police declined an interview for this story.

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During an Aug. 18 press conference, LMPD's homicide division leader Lt. Donnie Burbrink said the department has been "inundated" with issues it's never dealt with — the pandemic and protests, both of which are playing a role in the increase.

"We at LMPD, specifically the homicide unit, are seeing an escalation of violent crime and are working tirelessly to address it," Burbrink said. "Having said that, this is merely throwing one resource at a gigantic problem. 

"The police department cannot handle this alone. This is a community-wide issue that's affected an innumerable amount of people. This is a problem that needs to be tackled together."

'No urgency'

Russell Coleman, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, said in July his office is working to combat violent crime, but the issue isn't being — and hasn't been —addressed with any sort of urgency in the community.

That's a problem, he said. It's one 2X agrees with.

"We're not placing resources there sufficiently. We are not taking to the street and demanding an impact to lower those (shootings)," Coleman said. "And it's infuriating to talk to victims' families (because) there has not been that focus locally." 

When a child is sick, 2X said, parents rarely hesitate to take the child to see a doctor.

“We’ve got to be willing to do the same as it relates to this easily described public health issue — these reckless shootings that have become the virus that’s not spoken about in so many words,” he said. “We’ve got to change our attitudes about how these shootings have become a public health issue and stop trying to dismiss it as not that.”

The problem, though, is that violence-prevention plans in Louisville don't always include the voices of young people most at risk of being the victims — or perpetrators — of that violence, Woods said.

“You have to be talking to the persons who are involved in the mayhem, or the persons who have influence over the mayhem," he said. "Everything else is just conversation."

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Coleman is working with criminologist David Kennedy from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City to develop a tailored group-violence reduction program for Louisville.

“I would go so far as to say if we didn’t have Russell Coleman, I'd argue that there would be nobody in the law enforcement realm in Louisville that cares about (the homicide problem)," Piagentini said.

Although the details remain unknown, a potentially similar approach — guided by Kennedy — was tried nearly a decade ago in New Orleans with mixed results.

That city’s Democratic mayor, Mitch Landrieu, tapped Kennedy to help craft what would be called NOLA for Life, a comprehensive program designed to tamp down New Orleans’ notoriously high murder rate.

One piece of the puzzle, called the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, sought to identify gang members or people believed responsible for chronic acts of violence.

Simply put, known gang members or people linked to group violence who were on probation were gathered in a room and given a choice: They could turn their lives around with support from a coalition of city and nonprofit agencies or a coalition of city, state and federal law enforcement would come after them and their associates.

Murders in New Orleans fell by 22% in two years after NOLA for Life was launched in 2012, but they started to tick back up in 2015.

By 2018, with shootings and murders still on the rise, a transition team for Landrieu’s successor, LaToya Cantrell, recommended that NOLA for Life be replaced, in part, because of "an overreliance on short-term solutions and utilization of underfunded programs not directly connected to the goal of violence reduction."

Violence 'going on everywhere'

Louisville isn't alone in its rising violence. Green said being in the midst of a pandemic and a new civil rights revolution has led to increased emotions.

"What we have to do in Louisville is not so much different than what’s going on everywhere," she said. "It's about trying to get the country back on track, about getting people back to work, about getting COVID numbers down so we can get kids engaged."

Nearby cities like Cincinnati and Indianapolis are also seeing shooting spikes.

Related:Louisville breaks annual homicide record after 4 men were fatally shot overnight

With 70 homicides this year as of Sept. 9, Cincinnati is already near its 2019 year-end total of 73. The city is on pace to have more than 100 homicides, surpassing its 2006 record of 88.

The outlook in Indianapolis is also grim. As of Sept. 1, there'd been 129 criminal homicides. The record, set in 2018, is 159.

As of Sept. 9, Nashville — a much larger city than Louisville — had 68 homicides, which is 19 more than on the same date last year. However, the figures aren't abnormal when compared to recent years.

"There is no simple explanation for the increases," Porter said.

"And months of protests for racial justice have taxed LMPD at a time the department is also seeing more retirements and resignations, due in part to the opportunity for higher salaries at smaller departments in our region," she said.

Rates lower in white neighborhoods

Violence has historically been concentrated on the West End of Louisville — and still is, statistics show.

2X said there's a disconnect between areas hit hardest by gun violence — particularly Black communities on the west side — and the rest of the city. The rising body count in Louisville isn't being treated with the same urgency as other public health crises, he said.

So far this year, 74% of all criminal homicides and nonfatal shootings — as of Sept. 13 — have been in three of the city's eight police patrol divisions: the First, Second and Fourth.

The three divisions make up the entire West End, from the Ohio River to Cane Run Road in the southwest part of town and east to just north of the airport, excluding Shively, which has its own police department.

The divisions also include the downtown area, East Market District, Butchertown and Phoenix Hill.

Roughly three out of every four homicide victims this year have been Black, LMPD data shows, and more than 80% of people wounded in shootings have been Black.

“If you’ve got certain sections of our community who are not subjected to this kind of urban bombardment, which is ferocious, vicious gun play, you can’t totally register what it feels like when shots go off in the neighborhood and you have to duck under the bed and get away from the windows,” 2X said.

Councilwoman Green, who said she's raising her family in the urban core, worries every day about the increasing violence. There are tears, anxiety and frequent discussions when another young person dies, she said.

Victims in Louisville are most likely to be Black males, statistics show.

“It’s traumatizing, not just for the families, but for the entire community," Green said. "I’m sitting here literally 9 months pregnant, ready to bring another Black male into the world any day now, any second really.”

Reporters Natalie Alund, James Briggs and Brandon Knight contributed to this story.

Kala Kachmar is an investigative reporter. Reach her at 502-582-4469; kkachmar@courierjournal.com or @NewsQuip on Twitter. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/subscribe.

Jonathan Bullington is an investigative reporter. Reach him at: 502-582-4241; JBullington@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @jrbullington.