Years before Breonna Taylor’s death, LMPD officer’s Lexington supervisor saw issues
A police officer fired over the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville previously worked as an officer in Lexington, and his Lexington supervisor recommended against his reemployment.
Officer Brett Hankison was fired in June by the Louisville Metro Police Department for “extreme violations” of the department’s policies in the shooting that killed Taylor in March.
Hankison joined the Lexington Police Department in 1999 and resigned in December of 2002. He was hired by the Louisville Metro Police Department in 2003.
The Lexington Police Department does not keep informal complaints in employee personnel files after two years, and formal complaints are only kept for five years after that employee leaves the department. So any informal or formal complaints “no longer exist” and were not included in Hankison’s personnel file when it was recently obtained by the Herald-Leader.
However, the file still contained record of a 20-hour unpaid suspension for “dereliction of duty” in 2002, a number of letters from citizens thanking him for his service and a memorandum in which his supervisor recommended against his future reemployment.
Hankison’s supervising sergeant at the time, Patrick McBride, submitted a memorandum with Hankison’s resignation and said the officer had asked it to be “forwarded through the chain of command” because he wanted to be hired elsewhere.
“Based on my observations and supervision of this officer for the past calendar year, I would not recommend him for reemployment at any time in the future,” McBride wrote in the memo. “Due to his actions in violation of standing orders, refusal to accept supervision, and general poor attitude toward the Division of Police and its commanding staff, I would in fact be strongly against the same.”
Barry Cecil, a captain with the Lexington Police Department at the time, submitted his memo in which he wrote he concurred with McBride and thought “Officer Hankison may be better suited for a larger police agency.”
The Louisville Metro Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Hankison’s Lexington personnel file and any memos therein would’ve been obtained before his hiring. But the file and memos are available to the public through an open records request.
The other two LMPD officers who were involved in the operation that led to Taylor’s shooting death, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and detective Myles Cosgrove, have not been fired, and none of the three officers has been criminally charged.
In Hankison’s June 23 termination letter from LMPD, acting Chief Robert Schroeder wrote that Hankison acted with “extreme indifference to the value of human life when you wantonly and blindly fired ten rounds into the apartment of Breonna Taylor.”
Specifically, Schroeder wrote that Hankison was found to have violated two aspects of standard operating procedure: use of deadly force and obedience to rules and regulations.
In addition to the allegations surrounding Taylor’s death, the Courier-Journal reported in early June that at least two women have come forward saying they were sexually assaulted by Hankison.
Taylor, a Black woman, died on March 13 after being shot multiple times by police who were serving a no-knock warrant at her apartment. She was 26 years old.
The warrant was carried out in connection with a narcotics investigation, but no drugs were found at Taylor’s home, and the person police were seeking did not live there.
Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired at the officers when they came through the apartment door that night, striking Mattingly in the leg. In court motions, Walker’s attorneys said the officers were not in uniform and burst into the apartment without announcing themselves.
Taylor’s death, along with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sparked protests around the country calling for an end to police violence against Black people.
When Hankison resigned from the Lexington Police Department, he was working in the bureau of patrol’s east sector. His records show that he completed more than 1,000 hours of basic training when he joined Lexington.
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 2:17 PM.
