Thread by @RootResearch

Property & Policing in Lousville, KY: our investigation documents Louisville’s nuisance law, and how the forces of placed based policing were complicit in the murder of Breonna Taylor. storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/4add4e…

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 @louisvillemayor rapidly employed the concept of Place Based Investigation (PBI) to hyper-criminalize Black personhood.

Metro Council expanded LMPD power in nuisance cases in Oct 2018, resulting in a sharp increase. In the 6 months following the amendment, there were 148 nuisance cases, compared to 89 cases in the previous 6 months; a 65% increase.

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.

A Codes and Regulations supervisor 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 detainer filings drastically under-represent evictions.

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.

The density of nuisance violations and major development projects in Russell have a high spatial correlation. Many of the these development projects in Russell occur near the highest concentration of nuisance violations, including the Elliott Avenue project.

Community Outreach as Surveillance - In 2018, Louisville Metro Government entered into a 2-year contract with Keeping it Real Neighborhood Institute, Inc. (KIR) for $110,000. KIR’s job was to establish contact with residents on Elliott Ave and extract information from them.

The concept of Place Based Investigations (PBI) was introduced to LMPD in May of 2019. PBI focuses on how crime can be removed from an area through the design and management of places, or by disrupting what its practitioners call, "toxic networks of places and neighborhoods."

Pressure from @louisvillemayor 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.

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.

One of our open records requests found that @LMPD Sgt. #JonathanMattingly, 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.”

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

Following the accusations, the @louisvillemayor released a Project Overview of the Elliott Ave project. 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.

B/t 2017 & 2020 @louisvillekygov purchased 28 properties on the 2400 and 2600 blocks of Elliott Ave, mostly through foreclosures that they initiated. They now own more than half the properties on the street, with @wearehpi owning four more (also acquired between 2018 and 2020).

In October 2021, Fifth Third Bank announced that they were making a $20 million investment in the Russell neighborhood as part of their Neighborhood Investment Program.

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 @stoplapdspying calls “speculative policing,” which they describe as “policing based on mass suspicion and wholesale criminalization of communities and places.”