New housing department, more police disclosure in works to address racism in Lexington
The city of Lexington is looking at starting a new department to handle all housing issues, creating a new program to help poor homeowners pay for code enforcement violations and requiring implicit bias training for all 3,200 Lexington city employees.
Those were some of the more than 54 recommendations that Mayor Linda Gorton’s Commission for Racial Justice and Equality released in late October. The commission was asked to look at racial justice in numerous areas, including housing, economic development, health care, law enforcement and education.
On Tuesday, Gorton gave an update on the status of those recommendations nearly a month after the report was released.
The city has already addressed some recommendations, including setting aside $2 million for eviction prevention and utility payments. It has also set aside $500,000 for a disparity study to help it increase the amount of minority business contracts. The city reported earlier this year that 20 percent of its contracts went to minority-owned businesses, but the majority of those contracts went to white business owners — women or veterans. Only 1 percent in 2019 went to black-owned businesses, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported earlier this year.
“After we received the report in October, we immediately began to identify recommendations and categorized them as short, medium and long-term projects,” Gorton said during a Tuesday Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council work session.
Gorton said the city will create a new department of housing and community support to deal with all housing issues. That new department will likely include code enforcement, affordable housing and homelessness services. A presentation on what that new department would look like is expected sometime in January or February, Gorton said.
Also under housing, the city is looking at starting a code enforcement loan program to help poor homeowners who may have code violations but no money available to fix those violations. Gorton said the city will have to find the money for that program in its next budget.
“This will be money set aside for low-income people to fix those code violations,” Gorton said.
Many Black homeowners in the East End have complained that costly code violations force people out of their homes.
The city is also looking at starting a permanent commission on racism and equality. That will also be presented to the council sometime in early 2021.
Gorton proposes implicit bias training for all 3,200 city employees as recommended by the commission. Police have implicit bias training, but city employees have never received it.
The council approved $120,000 for that training after some debate. Gorton changed the funding source to a city savings account after concerns were raised by the public and many council members about using money for eviction prevention and utility payments.
There is still a lot to do, Gorton said of the recommendations.
“We are still working with our community partners to address some of the recommendations that were outside of the city,” Gorton said. “We will be meeting with them in the new year.”
The city is also looking for federal and state grants to help it fund some of the recommendations.
Changes also are underway in the police department
The city has already set aside more than $261,000 to purchase additional body-worn cameras for Lexington police that currently do not have them. All police officers that have regular interaction with the public currently wear one. Roughly one-third of Lexington police officers don’t. Upper-level commanders are among those who do not wear cameras.
Buying cameras for all police officers was one of the commission’s recommendations. The cameras will likely be available sometime in the spring.
Police are also piloting a new program with New Vista, a community mental health provider, to provide more crisis outreach for those police calls where a social worker or mental health worker can help.
Assistant Chief Brian Maynard said the department has put more information on the city’s website about the disposition of complaints and investigations against police officers. The department has also enhanced the type of information it is tracking. For example, information by race on automobile searches was not collected. Maynard said the city started doing that in October. Other cities, including Louisville, track automobile searches by race.
But some of the major recommendations of the racial justice commission’s law enforcement subcommittee, including adding three citizens to an internal police disciplinary review board and adding a person to help citizens file complaints against police, have to be negotiated as part of the Fraternal Order of Police Bluegrass Lodge 4 contract, Maynard said.
Negotiations on that contract are currently underway, Maynard said.
The commission also recommended banning no-knock warrants. But Gorton said the city does not have plans to ban those warrants. Currently, Lexington has a moratorium on no-knock warrants, but not a ban.
Other cities are also grappling with how to do deal with long-standing inequalities in policing, health care, education and economic development.
Gorton’s update came the same day Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer declared racism a public health crisis by executive order. Since the death of Breonna Taylor by Louisville Metro Police in March during the serving of a botched no-knock warrant, Louisville has banned no-knock warrants and created an office of inspector general and a new civilian review board for the Louisville Metro Police. The state legislature must approve a change in state law to allow the inspector general to issue subpoenas to witnesses.
Louisville is the only city allowed to have a citizen review board. For Lexington to do so, state law would have to be changed.
This story was originally published December 1, 2020 at 5:47 PM.
