Following the public release of the body-camera footage showing the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Martin Nitzken Jr., the depth of the systemic failure within the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) has been laid bare for the entire world to see. Mr. Nitzken was unarmed, unclothed, and visibly experiencing a profound psychological emergency when he was shot and killed by Officer Nathan Stott.

While Police Chief Paul Humphrey’s swift action in initiating termination proceedings against Nathan Stott is a necessary step, bureaucratic firing is not justice. We must be clear: walking toward an officer while completely naked and defenseless during a healthcare crisis is not a capital offense. The Louisville Urban League, ACLU Kentucky, VOCAL Kentucky, and concerned community members demand that the city and Commonwealth Attorney move past the absolute bare minimum of administrative discipline and follow through on their promise of criminal accountability with a thorough investigation and systemic transparency.

A Pattern of Fatal Neglect

This tragedy is not an isolated incident. Just two months ago, our community mourned the police killing of Katelyn Hall during another mental health episode—an intersection of crisis and state violence that left Louisvillians asking if her death could have been prevented. We know that it could have been, and it should have been.

The blood of Martin Nitzken Jr. and Katelyn Hall underscores a devastating reality: LMPD continues to treat healthcare crises as opportunities for combat instead of care.

The Unfulfilled Promises of the Consent Decree

What makes these tragedies profoundly sickening is that a clear, binding roadmap to prevent them already exists. The federal Consent Decree entered into by the United States and Louisville Metro specifically targets the city’s failures under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act regarding behavioral health emergencies. And even though the federal government abandoned the original agreement, its contents and recommendations are no less true or valuable.

Discrete Section VIII of the original Consent Decree lays out clear, actionable mandates that have been flagrantly ignored in practice:

• Healthcare-First Response: The decree explicitly required Louisville Metro to provide emergency responses to people with behavioral health needs that utilize the “most behavioral health-involved and least police-involved response appropriate.” The city should implement and expand this to include substance abuse cases and the unhoused.  
• Independent Practitioners: The agreement mandated the deployment of Mobile Crisis Response Teams that are explicitly not employees of LMPD.
• Clinicians in the Lead: The decree dictated that when both police and clinicians are present, clear protocols must ensure that behavioral health professionals take the lead in interacting with the individual in crisis.
• Enshrined Goals: Diverting individuals from unnecessary police contact and achieving this health-first framework were designated as Key Objectives of city-wide police reform.

Though the city implemented its own version of the decree, the Community Commitment, had we fully operationalized these original protocols, an unarmed, naked man sitting in the street would have been met by an empathetic, de-escalation-trained medical team—not an officer with a loaded firearm.

Uncompromised Support for Prosecution

The community recognizes the strict statutory boundaries imposed by state law (KRS 15.520(6)(c)), which restricts Mayor Greenberg and others from making public statements before a final disposition in cases involving police officers. However, the legal inability to speak publicly does not absolve the Mayor, city administration, and LMPD leadership from their duty to act aggressively within the system. Silence in the press must be met with unyielding execution behind closed doors.

We call upon Mayor Craig Greenberg and Chief Paul Humphrey to systematically dismantle any internal blue wall and ensure that LMPD gives its full, uncompromised institutional support to the criminal investigation. Under Paragraph 139(b) of the federal Consent Decree, LMPD’s Public Integrity Unit (PIU) is explicitly mandated to conduct thorough criminal investigations into all Level 4 uses of reportable force. Chief Humphrey must ensure PIU operates with absolute objectivity, providing an unsparing, airtight pipeline of evidence, investigative files, and witness testimonies directly to the prosecutor’s desk. State law may limit what leadership can say, but it does not limit how hard they can work internally to ensure an officer faces a resilient prosecutorial case.

Boldness from the Commonwealth’s Attorney

While there are statutory restrictions on public speech in ongoing cases, the Commonwealth’s Attorney answers only to the law, the constitution, and the people of Louisville. Nothing is preventing our city’s top prosecutor from moving swiftly, decisively, and publicly in pursuit of a criminal conviction against Nathan Stott.

We expect the Commonwealth’s Attorney, Gerina Whethers, to bring the same aggressive, public-facing energy to police violence that she brings to community crime. Just last year, she boldly and publicly signaled a willingness to use the full weight of her office to go after children and hit their parents with penalties to curb youth crime. If the Commonwealth’s Attorney can command headlines and innovate legal theories to target local families, she must display that same public boldness, definitive speed, and legal courage when prosecuting a killer cop. Equal justice demands that a badge never serve as a shield against aggressive prosecution. The community is watching, and we expect nothing less than a swift, public, and uncompromising path toward a criminal indictment and conviction.

Demands for Systemic Overhaul

These tragedies prove that LMPD’s active operational habits remain lethal. The city must expose the structural failures that allowed this tragedy to occur just two months after the police killing of Katelyn Hall under similar circumstances. To ensure no more families have to bury loved ones killed during a health crisis, we demand:

• Independent Mobile Deployment: LMPD must immediately change and expand its current 911 dispatch protocols. A trained, certified, non-LMPD mental health practitioner must be automatically dispatched to every emergency involving a behavioral health crisis, regardless of the perceived danger.
• Clinicians in Operational Command: In strict accordance with the Consent Decree, when police and clinicians are both present, mental health experts must take the operational lead. If armed officers are present, they should serve only in a secondary, defensive support capacity if a verified physical threat to public safety arises.
• Empower Mental Health Oversight: The city must expand representation and delegate clear power and decision-making authority to the Mental Health Subcommittee of the Community Safety Commission and the Behavioral Health Coordination and Oversight Council (Section 10 of the Community Commitment). While these committees currently exist, they lack the role clarity, authority, and transparency they need to advance substantive change.
• Commit to the Commitment: The Community Commitment should be codified into an ordinance with at least the following additions:
• Metro Council oversight for all disputes between the independent monitor and LMPD. Accountability and independent oversight are critical to ensuring that LMPD adopts changed behavior and improved policies and practices. Absent federal or state court oversight, the Metro Council is the best place for such oversight to reside.
• Reinstate the original Consent Decree’s specific timeframes for Use of Force reports and investigations. The DOJ consent decree had specific time frames for investigations against officers accused of using excessive force. LMPD agreed to those time frames, but they are modified in the Community Commitment and should be reinstated. 

“The city cannot claim, in the press and on paper, it is acting in good faith to fix its patterns of bad behavior while its active habits on the ground continue to produce body counts,” said Lyndon Pryor, Louisville Urban League President & CEO. “We do not want more revised handbooks and apologies after-the-fact. We want explicit support for justice, and an immediate shift to a human-first emergency response to ensure this never happens again.”

About the Louisville Urban League
The Louisville Urban League assists African Americans and those at the margins in attaining social and economic equality and stability through direct services and advocacy. For more information, go to lul.org or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads.

About ACLU of Kentucky 
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Kentucky is freedom’s watchdog, working daily in the courts, legislature, and communities to defend individual rights and personal freedoms. For additional information, visit our website.

About VOCAL Kentucky
VOCAL-KY (Voices of Community Activists & Leaders – Kentucky) is a Louisville-based non-profit that builds power for low-income people affected by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness, advocating for systemic change through community organizing, direct action, and policy advocacy. VOCAL-KY is membership led and focuses on issues like housing rights, ending the opioid crisis, police accountability, criminal justice reform and working to create healthier and more just communities across Kentucky’s 120 counties. 

About the Louisville Branch NAACP 
The Louisville Branch NAACP actively works to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights for all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination. For more information, visit lounaacp.org or follow us on Facebook or Twitter (@LouNAACP).

Other organizations represented in the Coalition include: Dove Delegates, Black Leadership Action Coalition of Kentucky (BLACK), Defending the Early Years, Families United Corporation, Feminist Majority Foundation, Forward Justice Action Network, Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, Louisville Showing Up For Racial Justice (LSURJ), The 490 Project, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC), and The Justice Center At All People’s.