LOUISVILLE, Ky. — With 188 homicides in 2021 and 41 in the first three months of this year, there is pressure on the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) to help rein in the violence.
"Am I happy with where we're at?" LMPD Police Chief Erika Shields said. "Am I satisfied? No. We have way too many homicides."
Last year, Mayor Greg Fischer appointed a new chief, Erika Shields, to run LMPD after continued public outcry for police reform, transparency and a demand for new leadership.
WHAS11's Rachel Droze sat down with her Tuesday to look back at her first year in office and find out her goals for the future.
"When you have the homicides we're having, the math becomes highly secondary," Shields said. "Violent crime, we really have to do a stronger job of reining [it] in, we have a lot of hiring to do, we obviously have a huge amount of work to do with the community — particularly the Black community. We have large obstacles, but none of them are insurmountable."
In 2021, LMPD's clearance rate sat at 35%, meaning they solved about a third of homicides last year.
That's much lower than the national average, which is about 50%, and part of the reason why Shields spent time focusing on getting LMPD the tools needed to close cases.
Shields said one problem she identified when looking at what could be behind the low clearance rate was an understaffed homicide unit.
"The homicide detectives were managing a far greater caseload than they should be doing," Shields said.
Shields said understaffing caused detectives to get assigned new cases before they could make progress on other cases they were investigating.
Shields said she also found a two-year backlog on DNA testing when she arrived, which she said is a vital tool used to make arrests in homicides.
"What that means is the individual who's killed someone is going to be on the street for at least probably for another two years if you don't have other non-forensic evidence to make a conviction," Shields said. "We have resolved that issue as well, so I think we should now be in a space where I would expect the clearance rate to go up."
You can watch the full interview on the WHAS11 YouTube channel here.
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Have a news tip? Email assign@whas11.com, visit our Facebook page or Twitter feed.