Louisville’s new police chief wants to bring optimism back to troubled department

Louisville’s new Interim Police Chief Paul Humphrey has seen the department’s reputation take hit after hit in recent years. There was the sexual abuse scandal inside the Youth Explorer program in 2018. In 2020, the police killing of Breonna Taylor sparked a summer of nightly protests against racism and police violence. And most recently, multiple women within LMPD have spoken up about workplace sexual harassment , which led to the forced resignation of Chief Jackie Gwinn-Villaroe l and Humphrey’s ascension.

In an interview with LPM News, Humphrey said that after years of embarrassing headlines, he’s ready to bring some positivity back to the department.

“Think about it, four years of negative talk has not made us strive the way that it should,” he said. “We need to take a different approach to this.”

Humphrey said he wants to see officers taking pride in their work and in their department again, rather than focusing on where LMPD may have failed in the past. He said he plans to lead the department with optimism.

“An optimistic person will look you in your face, tell you, ‘This is bad,’ but I’m going to work my butt off to make it better,” he said. “And they’re going to tell you that I think we have the legitimate potential to be one of the best police departments in the country.”

For Humphrey, optimism doesn’t mean abandoning discipline, accountability and reform. During the interview with LPM, he expressed frustration with recent scandals that don’t relate to policing.

“I think people can accept when we mess up doing police work — we have to correct those mistakes, we can’t just continually make the same mistakes — but I think people are okay with us making mistakes in policing,” Humphrey said. “What we’re not okay with, as a command staff and a community, is those self-inflicted wounds. We can’t spend all of our time dealing with administrative, personnel issues … Those are different levels of issues that we have to get out of here.”

A culture change

In order to create a more optimistic culture within LMPD, Humphrey must navigate what his predecessor described as an “invasive presence of professional and ethical apathy” that permeates the department. Gwinn-Villaroel wrote in her resignation letter, which was released publicly earlier this month , that LMPD’s “cultural deficiencies” included “cronyism, cliques and indiscretion, bullying and backbiting.”

Asked about Gwinn-Villaroel’s letter, Humphrey said he had a different assessment. He said LMPD had sometimes failed to set clear standards and expectations for officer performance, which can lead to stagnation. That’s something he plans to change, he said.

“People want to perform at a high standard, they just need to know what the standard is, have it clearly communicated to them and have it reinforced on a daily basis,” Humphrey said. “Once we do that consistently, what you’ll see is some of those self-inflicted wounds start to go away.”

To build a culture of improvement, Humphrey said LMPD will need to be more transparent, both to the public and to its officers. He noted that, in the past, the department thought it was being transparent when it was quickly releasing body camera footage when officers fired their weapons and it released spreadsheets of its traffic stop data publicly.

“But that was just information without context,” he said. “And the same thing was happening internally, with how we do data and information to provide feedback to officers.”

Humphrey said the department is working on creating “a solid feedback loop” between supervisors and officers that give them the ability to see how an officer is behaving and whether changes are needed. That includes regular audits and body camera footage reviews by supervisors.

Who is Paul Humphrey?

Paul Humphrey joined the Louisville Metro Police Department in 2006, after graduating from the University of Louisville with a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

He spent his first few years as a patrol officer, mainly in the Newburg and Russell neighborhoods. Before joining LMPD’s SWAT Team in 2010, he served as a Housing Authority Liaison Officer in the Beecher Terrace and Dosker Manor public housing complexes.

Humphrey eventually worked his way through the leadership ranks, becoming a major in 2019 and an assistant chief in 2021.

Most recently, he was tapped to help create LMPD’s Accountability and Improvement Bureau, which was focused on instituting many of the reforms recommended by Hillard-Heintze and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Prior to joining LMPD, Humphrey worked as a counselor at Brooklawn, which serves kids in the foster care system and other family crisis situations. He said his time there was “one of the most influential experiences of my life.”

“I grew up around some kids with some rough upbringings, but to really know the background and see the manifestations of what abuse and dysfunction really do to kids, it breaks your heart,” he said.

Humphrey said the experience gave him a soft spot for victims of crime, particularly children, and instilled a passion for protecting the public.

For Humphrey, working within the criminal justice system is also a family affair: His mother worked as a dispatcher for the city, his father worked in the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office and his sister, Yvette Gentry, served as interim police chief of LMPD in 2020 .

In announcing Humphrey’s promotion last month, Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city wouldn’t engage in a national search for a new police chief, for now. That means Humphrey will remain chief as the city finalizes negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice over a framework for police reform. That agreement, known as a consent decree , will be overseen by a federal judge and an independent monitor.