In July 2022, floods killed 45 people and caused more than a billion dollars of damage in eastern Kentucky. Then, the people who were supposed to help clean up actually made things worse for a lot of survivors. There’s big money in disaster recovery. In “Dirty Business,” we investigate the expensive, messy work of cleaning up after 2022’s catastrophic flooding ..read more

So much has changed since Louisville first proclaimed itself a model city for policing reform: the police chief was fired. The city was upended by protests and grief over Breonna Taylor, and David McAtee. But some things are the same: The anger. The frustration. The disconnect between the police and the community. In our season finale, city leadership makes a very familiar set of promises. Could 21st Century Policing work this time? Is it too late ..read more

“Early this morning, we had a critical incident involving one of our officers who was shot and another person at the scene who was killed.” When LMPD Chief Steve Conrad first described what happened in Breonna Taylor’s apartment on March 13, 2020, he did not mention her by name. But the city would soon learn it — then the country, and then the world. What came next demonstrated how far LMPD had fallen from its ideals. Crowd control tactics in 21st Century Policing call for de-escalation — but in the wake of a particularly violent first night of protests in Louisville, LMPD officers settled int ..read more

For LMPD to become the police department it claimed to want to be, the department would have to recruit the best of the best, retain experienced officers, and effectively discipline and remove problem one. But LMPD’s disciplinary system makes the latter hard to do. Former and current officers say the job can chew up and spit out people who want to do community policing — harming the most-policed communities in the process ..read more

Even as city leaders were making big promises about the model city they claimed Louisville was going to become, they were making decisions that undermined those policing reform goals. In 2016, there were 117 homicides in Louisville — at that point, the most in decades. Police responded with a “People, Places and Narcotics” strategy that targeted some Black neighborhoods with aggressive patrols ..read more

In 2016, the police chief laid out his vision: Louisville was going to become the kind of place where everyone across the city, no matter what neighborhood they lived in, would get the same treatment from the police — policing that’s about your protection, and safety. But that’s not what happened ..read more

Barbecue chef David McAtee, the man they called Yaya, was a staple at 26th and Broadway in Louisville’s predominately Black West End. He was a friend to everyone who stopped by for a meal — including many police officers. For years, Louisville had claimed to be building bridges between police and Black communities. Yaya was one of those bridges. Here’s what happened to him, and how ..read more

Louisville, Ky., the city now known for the police killing of Breonna Taylor, once made ambitious promises to transform its police department and mend its relationship with the Black community. Just five years before they killed Breonna Taylor in her home, Louisville considered itself a model city for police reform. In a joint KyCIR/Newsy investigation, insiders and documents reveal the systemic barriers and choices made by city leaders and the Louisville Metro Police Department that led to its failure to meaningfully change. How did Louisville go from a national leader in policing to the face ..read more

Jen Sainato had been waiting for this day for a long time. She’d woken up early, put on her black striped suit, and drove five hours to attend the Louisville Metro Council’s public safety committee meeting. The council had called the police to answer questions about their handling of rape cases, in the wake of our story about Jen’s case. When Jen walked into the council chamber, the police were already settled in at the front of the room: two press people, a few men in suits, and Lt. Shannon Lauder — the head of the special victims unit, who’d been called by the council to explain why her depa ..read more

It’s been two months since we released the first season of Dig. And a lot has changed: city leaders are calling the police department to account, and there have been some changes in Jen Sainato’s rape case that we did not see coming. Visit kydig.org and donate to support this and future seasons of Dig ..read more