Louisville’s police watchdog is urging the police department to take steps to address a recent report that found officers searched Black people at higher rates than white people and, when controlling for certain factors, were no more likely to find contraband.
The Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in an August 3 news release that it was “alarmed” by the undated report prepared by the data analytics company Sigma Squared.
“When one racial group accounts for a larger share of stops and is searched substantially more often, while those searches were less likely to uncover evidence supporting further enforcement action, LMPD must determine whether officer discretion, supervisory practices, enforcement strategies or departmental policies are contributing to the disparities,” the office, led by Inspector General Ed Harness, wrote.
Ed Harness will serve a second term as Inspector General after Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg announces it Wednesday morning.
Oct. 16, 2025
Louisville Metro Police Department has not publicly released the report; its existence was first reported by WDRB-TV. The report found that in 2025, officers searched Black people about 133% more often than white people, more than twice as often. After accounting for location, age range and stop reason, the report determined that officers searched Black people 66% more often than white people.
Despite searching Black people more often, LMPD officers were less likely to find contraband, such as drugs and firearms, according to the report. After accounting for location, age range, stop reason and search reason, discretionary searches (those based on consent or probable cause) yielded contraband 11% less often than for white people.
“This means officers are doing more searches on Black subjects without better results, indicating inefficient and potentially biased discretionary search decisions,” the report’s authors wrote.
About 22% of Louisville residents identified as Black alone in 2025, while 60% identified as white alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates.
LMPD conducts a traffic stop on in the 2700 block of West Market Street in Louisville, Kentucky Feb. 3, 2026.
In the news release, OIG called on LMPD to:
Officially release the complete report, underlying methodology, and supporting data, subject to lawful privacy protections;
Identify the officers, units, stop categories, and divisions exhibiting the largest disparities;
Conduct documented supervisory reviews of discretionary search activity;
Examine whether reasonable suspicion, probable-cause, and consent-search standards are constitutional;
Determine whether deployment strategies, enforcement priorities, or supervisory practices contribute to the disparities;
Establish measurable corrective actions and implementation deadlines, and
Publish periodic data on stops, searches, search results, and evidence recovery so that the public can evaluate whether conditions improve.
“True reform begins with acknowledging what the evidence demonstrates,” OIG said in the release. “LMPD’s own analysis identifies a racial disparity in traffic-stop composition and substantial, widespread racial disparities in discretionary searches, and concludes that officers are conducting searches of Black subjects without better results. Minimizing those findings will not correct them.”
Neither LMPD nor a spokesperson for Mayor Greenberg immediately responded to a request for comment on the demands.
The report follows Louisville Metro Council’s February 2025 approval of a $350,000 contract with Sigma Squared for the company to track traffic stops, pedestrian stops and uses of force through the end of 2025. According to WDRB-TV, LMPD is currently contracting with another data analytics company, Peregrine, to continue monitoring its internal data.
LMPD Chief Paul Humphrey says crime overall was down in 2025 during a press conference at police headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky January 8, 2026.
It also follows a now years-long push by LMPD Chief Paul Humphrey for officers to be more proactive: to make more traffic stops and pedestrian stops while increasing overall contact with Louisvillians.
Humphrey told WDRB-TV he accepted Sigma Squared’s findings as accurate and called the report a baseline for future training and improvement goals. He also told WDRB-TV that the department is conducting “targeted reviews” but has not yet begun examining the track records of individual officers with the most significant racial disparities in their stops.
Last week, The Courier Journal requested the report and its methodology from LMPD, but a spokesperson told the newspaper it would need to file an open records request. The Courier Journal also requested the report from Sigma Squared, but the company has not responded.
In February, The Courier Journal published a report on traffic stops after analyzing stop data from January through October 2025. It found that, when controlling for population, Black drivers were searched 5.5 times more often than white drivers. During that period, stops were most concentrated in Russell, Downtown and Portland, the former two focus areas for Louisville Metro.
The Courier Journal’s report also found that LMPD’s overall “hit rate,” when race was not accounted for, was 52%, a figure that one university professor who studies policing said could indicate officers were selective about when they searched vehicles rather than searching indiscriminately. Hit rates in many cities tend to range from 15% to 25%, the professor said.
Earlier this year, LMPD debuted an online dashboard displaying stop data. It includes the demographics of those stopped and the results of stops, such as citations, arrests and warnings. However, it does not display the number of searches or the number that resulted in contraband being found.
Monroe Trombly covers public safety. He can be reached at mtrombly@gannett.com or on Signal at MTromblyCJ.11.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: LMPD watchdog urges action on racial search disparities
