LEO Weekly Sept 29, 2021 by leoweekly

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 1PRIDE KENTUCKIANA PRIDE FESTIVAL RETURNSPAGE 27 WHO IS THE REAL SHIELDS?ERIKA

2 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 GERMANTOWN OKTOBERFEST! Beer + Food + Games + Fun OctoberSaturday2nd3-10pm LOCATED BEHIND GERMANTOWN MILL LOFTS IN THE HEART OF GERMANTOWN • Beer Garden Barrel Roll • Weiner Dog Races • Brat Toss German Inspired Food • Stein Hoisting Contest Stein Relay Race • Hammerschlagen Face Painting • Live Music by squeezebot FOUNDER John Yarmuth PUBLISHER Laura Snyder, lsnyder@leoweekly.com CONTROLLER Elizabeth Knapp, eknapp@leoweekly.com MANAGING EDITOR Scott Recker, srecker@leoweekly.com A&E EDITOR Erica Rucker, erucker@leoweekly.com DIGITAL CONTENT EDITOR Danielle Grady, dgrady@leoweekly.com ART DIRECTOR Talon Hampton, thampton@leoweekly.com CONTRIBUTING VISUAL ARTS EDITOR Jo Anne Triplett, jtriplettart@yahoo.com CONTRIBUTORS Robin Garr, Syd Bishop, Tyrel Kessinger, Dan Canon, Kevin Gibson, Cassie Chambers Armstrong, Josh Wood, Melissa Gaddie, Carolyn Brown, Felix Whetsel, Krystal Moore, Megan Metcalf, Dan Savage 974 BRECKENRIDGE LANE #170. LOUISVILLE KY 40207 PHONE (502) 895-9770 FAX (502) 895-9779 Volume 31 | Number 39 LOUISVILLE ECCENTRIC OBSERVER LEO Weekly is published weekly by LEO Weekly LLC. Copyright LEO Weekly LLC. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed herein are exclusively those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Publisher. LEO Weekly is available free of charge, limited to one copy per reader. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means, including electronic retrieval systems, without the express permission of LEO Weekly LLC. LEO Weekly may be distributed only by authorized independent contractors or authorized distributors. Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO) is a trademark of LEO Weekly LLC. ON THE COVER Writer Illustrations by Yoko Molotov ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Marsha Blacker, mblacker@leoweekly.com Lisa Dodson, lisa@leoweekly.com DISTRIBUTION MANAGER Megan Campbell Smith, distribution@leoweekly.com EUCLID MEDIA GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Andrew Zelman CHIEF OPERATING OFFICERS Chris Keating, Michael Wagner VP OF DIGITAL SERVICES Stacy www.euclidmediagroup.comVolhein PRIDE KENTUCKIANA PRIDE FESTIVAL RETURNS WHO IS THE REAL SHIELDS?ERIKA PHOTO BY JON CHERRY

Why are guns so easy to get? Most of these young people cannot afford to buy them. All of the weapons are not stolen, though they might be reported stolen to prevent their origin being traced outside of the areas where they are found. There are so many things about this that don’t add up. If these kids are participating in gang activity, shooting “stolen” weapons and selling drugs that are only obtained through importation, some very simple questions deserve immediate answers. How are the guns and drugs getting through, and why are kids still joining gangs if the root causes have such obvious remedies?Thereare no excuses the people in power can give when the answers are continually ignored, and the deaths of our children are still treated as an impetus to drive the forprofit prison system — or as insignificant collateral damage in the quest to destroy Black communities and buy up the available land for gentrification. There is much to be said and much that can be read into all of these situations. The bottom line with Shields is that she is very wrong to suggest that police should have a force in schools, and she’s doubly wrong to suggest that the police need to gather “intel” on children. My god, you’d think if intel is necessary, perhaps this is more a job for the CIA, since clearly these are not only troubled children but diabolical super criminals. It’s exhausting to say the obvious over and over but — fix the system, and we will repair the lives of these children so that they might have a chance to live a quality life. If the system continues to resist being repaired, perhaps it’s time to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch without the lens of white supremacy that keeps feeding lies and deception to protect itself. Shields plays the white supremacy game that sees “enforcement” as a solution instead of the true obvious solutions, which don’t offer our children as free labor to the prison complex. CAN KICK ROCKS ON SCHOOL RESOURCE

OFFICERS

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 3

By Erica Rucker | leo@leoweekly.com

• VIEWS EDITOR’S NOTE SHIELDS

ERIKA SHIELDS, Louisville’s police chief, came to the city after resigning in Atlanta following the killing of Rayshard Brooks, who was accused of pointing a taser — a non-fatal weapon — at police... while also running away. Yes, I raised my eyebrows, too. That’s not why we’re here, though. Shields, who comes to Louisville with a number of Black bodies in her wake, is now suggesting we allow a police force to be installed in our schools, alongside our children.

“Without having dedicated school resource officers trained in identifying gang members, conflict... we’re lacking critical intelligence. There simply has to be the acknowledgement... if we don’t wanna be here again... we can’t sit here with our thumbs up our ass, do nothing different and think we won’t be up at this podium,” Shields said. This statement by Shields should alarm every parent. Every parent. Shields, like most in law enforcement and many in government, is firmly planted in the idea that to solve the issue of youth violence, the only solution is to profile and send young children to jail right out of the classroom. Police, according to Shields, should be there to spy on and strong-arm young people. There are many reasons this is outrageous and a mess of a suggestion. Shields said the quiet part out loud, and parents of all kids should be at her office door. All violence has a root cause. All of it. It is rare for violence to occur outside of the boundaries of some very specific root, be that abuse, poverty, substance abuse or something else. What Shields is suggesting is to feed the prison pipeline with our Black children rather than finding real solutions to the reasons these young people find that a gang is the best choice for their lives. Why do young people seek association with gangs? We all have heard the reasons; they are well researched, documented and widely written about. And yet, we’re still having the same stupid conversations because the people in power find it too expensive or too time consuming to bring solutions to the people who truly need it. It’s easier to demonize and continue a version of the United States that has always enslaved, interred or deported those who challenge white ideals. White supremacy needs you to believe that punitive measures are the only ones that work, and though they don’t point the fingers at Black children, every Black parent and most other parents are aware of what Shields is suggesting. The youth violence in the city has resulted in the deaths of local teens. Too many. Most recently 16-year old Tyree Smith who was gunned down at a school bus stop. One thing that Shields said that makes sense is when she questions where these young people are getting the weapons.

BY NOW, everyone has heard the news of the Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’s SB8, a law which includes a process for putting a bounty on the heads of anyone even remotely involved in an abortion. Lawmakers in Indiana, Kentucky and other deep-red states are busy redrawing districts to ensure GOP domination for the next decade, but you can bet they’re taking notes on this major christofascist victory in Texas and drawing up battle plans accordingly. We are perhaps months away from having to smuggle people seeking abortion care across the Illinois border. I like to brand myself an optimist, but we need to have a clear-eyed, stone-sober, ice-on-your-spine conversation about who or what is going to save us red-state types from more bills like SB8. I’ll skip to the end: No one. Nothing. First, let’s dispel the “lone savior” myth. Since a smattering of narrow victories by southern Democrats in 2020, I’ve heard a lot about how our own version of Stacey Abrams will spring forth, fully formed, from the head of some unknown deity, and with a mighty trumpet blast call an extra 100,000 hitherto-undiscovered voters out of their hiding places so we can finally wrest power from Mitch McConnell and all the forces of Hell itself. This cheerfully indolent strategy has a possibility of working in the deep South, where hithertoignored minority groups exist in large enough numbers to swing an election. Even Texas might get a dose of antivenin if their demographic shift outpaces the GOP’s aggressive voter suppression and redistricting efforts. Here in the ivory-white Midwest? Not anytime soon. “Ah, but the children!” you say. “The children will save us!” Let’s put that idea out of its misery too. When I ran for Congress in 2018, I thought Democrats had a real shot in Indiana. My primary opponent and I registered thousands of students to vote in bright-blue Bloomington. But not nearly enough of them voted, and we got crushed by a rich-guy Congressman who has never tried to hide the fact that he was elected to Congress to do rich-guy stuff. And that was in the midterm of a President who was shamelessly hostile to everything not-himself. Even some metropolitan areas can’t seem to floss themselves out of the teeth of reactionaries. Cincinnati has been represented since 2013 by two (two!) Republicans who, while apparently not MTG-level insane, still consistently voted for the worst of Trump’s agenda. Voters didn’t oust them in 2018 or 2020, and it’s hard to see why they would in 2022. Lexington is a comparatively forwardthinking college town that once elected an openly gay mayor, but persists in sending a pandering potatohead to the House of Representatives; one who knows better, but can’t stop himself from yammering on about “radical abortion agendas” and “Bidenflation.” He’s not going anywhere either. There is no phantom army of Greta Thunbergs lurking in Appalachia, no Parkland kids tucked away in the suburbs of the heartland, no sleeping community of third-generation Black Panthers waiting in the bushes for the right moment to strike. If there is, they’re more likely to be saving up money to move to blue states than fretting over electoral politics in hopelessly red counties. Unless there is a sudden influx of critical thinkers into states that have made it quite clear that they have no place for critical thinkers, the most airheaded of democratic-idealists must concede that our only hope is for thousands of listless, disaffected white non-voters to suddenly become energized, get off their asses, jump the hurdles du jour to get to the polls, and tick a box next to whatever mayonnaise-chugging moderate the DNC has deemed worthy of appearing on a ballot. Anything I can imagine that would create that kind of motivation is a creature worse than Trump, so I don’t want to imagine it.

It seems equally unlikely that we red-state Gen-Xers and millennials are going to band together and save ourselves with collective action. We swore if Roe were ever overturned that there would be hell to pay, that we’d be in the streets until we melted into the asphalt, that we’d shut it all down somehow. That idea, too, seems to have been a product of toxic optimism. SB8 went into effect with a whimper, not a bang. Here I am at my PC, there you are reading an altweekly. I’ll continue to write thinkpieces and put up my feet and drink my coffee in the morning and wave politely to my MAGA-hat-wearing neighbors, and so will you, because we have been relatively comfortable for so long. But if any news can finally make us uncomfortable enough to act, the knife twist of SB8, and the Supreme Court’s disinterested side-glance at the resulting wound, should be it. Now we can plainly see that the courts, the flimsiest of bridges under our aching feet, have finally collapsed.

I want to end this piece on a hopeful note, but I can’t ﬁnd one. It’s clear that we have to act, but I don’t know what to do, how to do it or whether it will work. All I know for sure is that no one is going to do it for us.

4 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 VIEWS THE MIDWESTERNIST IF THE COURTS WON’T SAVE US, WHO WILL?

By Dan Canon | leo@leoweekly.com

The threat of having some abjectly cruel law overturned by the courts was often all that kept that law from passing. With that threat removed, what will become of us as Republican politicians race each other to the middle ages? Off the top of my head: At a bare minimum, any remaining restrictions on guns will be gone. Trans kids will be run out of schools. Schools themselves may shutter entirely, as many state lawmakers are no longer shy about criticizing public education as a failed experiment in socialist indoctrination. Previously unsuccessful attempts to legalize murder-by-car of protesters will become a reality. Christian clerks won’t have to issue marriage licenses, Christian schools will be able to reject students on the basis of their race, and Christian employers will be able to force women to grow their hair and their skirts till they both hit the ﬂoor. And, of course, it will become a lot harder to vote, especially for city folk.

The nonstop wave of conservative judges since Reagan made things bad enough before 2016. Then we watched for four years as Trump installed hundreds of Ayn Rand acolytes, tax-evading sovereign citizens and psychotic bloggers into lifetime positions on the federal courts. Those lower court judges are now openly calling on the SCOTUS to overturn Roe, they are dismantling unions, they are whittling civil rights down to an impotent nub. They will give red-state ingmuchGiveneverythinglegislatorstheywant.oursituation,amoreinterest-questionthan “Who is coming to save us?” is “Where is the bottom?”

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 5 The book Louisville has been waiting for! First, there was John Berendt. Now DavidcomesDominé. A sledgehammer. A body in the basement. A gay love triangle. Kinky sex, illicit drugs, counterfeit money, drag queens and a spooky old house. You couldn't make this stuff up. “Dominé provides an enthralling deep dive into a bizarre murder case, enhanced by his eyewitness account of the resulting trials. He gives this colorful case the detailed attention it merits. Fans of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will be captivated.” ~Publishers Weekly IN-PERSON EVENTS • September 30, 7 - 9 PM Debut Reading and Signing (Carmichael’s Bookstore, Frankfort Avenue) • October 1 - 3, 10 AM - 5 PM St. James Court Art Show (CCHM Authors Tent) • October 14, 6 PM A Ghostly Evening with David Dominé (Spalding University) • October 15 - 17, 10 AM - 5 PM Victorian Ghost Walk (Haskins Hall, 1402 St. James Court) • October 21, 7 - 9 PM An Intimate Evening with David Dominé (Conrad-Caldwell House Museum) • November 6, 10 AM - 6 PM Kentucky Book Festival (Joseph Beth Booksellers, Lexington)

The building, meanwhile, originally had a tower built into it, and served a hook-and-ladder firefighting team that worked with horses and carriages pulling steam pumpers in order to fight fires. It’s also believed the tower was used as sort of a lookout point for spotting fires, perhaps a boost to primitive alarm systems.

The nameplate tribute on the ﬁrehouse facade apparently was a nod to Stoll’s ongoing service to the city, and it could be speculated that he was instrumental in securing funding for the ﬁrehouse. Despite Stoll’s contributions to his city, people still continue to mispronounce his name. Next time you stop in at the Silver Dollar, down a whiskey in Albert’s good honor.

IT WILL ALWAYS BE ‘THE OLD SEARS BUILDING’

• Kevin Gibson. | PHOTO BY BUTCH BAYS.

By Kevin Gibson | leo@leoweekly.com [Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from “This Used to Be Louisville,” a new book by Kevin Gibson that tells the stories of some of Louisville’s most fascinating historical buildings. It is available on Amazon and at bookstores such as Carmichael’s. The retail price is $22.50. There will also be a signing event at 6 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 1 at Hilltop Tavern.]

GIVE YOUR REGARDS TO BROADWAY (THEATRE) In Louisville, as in so many American cities, the early part of the 20th century saw a boom of theaters that alternated between showing films and hosting live entertainment. They became neighborhood hubs of entertainment and socialization, which naturally made them beloved in their time. Broadway Theatre in the eastern half of Broadway, within walking distance of several neighborhoods, is one I have heard about often from my father. He and his friends would walk from his grandmother’s Germantown house in the 1950s, stop at the local ice company for a chunk of ice (the theater wasn’t air-conditioned, and Louisville summers were hot), and then sneak the ice into the movie to keep cool. Sometimes water was flicked. At times, pea shooters were employed. Sometimes, they got kicked out before the movie was over. But they always had fun, because it was the local theater and they were kids. Built in 1915, the grand theater actually replaced an earlier, much smaller version that seated about 300. Remodeled and rebuilt after a fire, the expanded Broadway Theatre came closer to seating 800, and that version, which still exists, originally hosted traditional theater, vaudeville, burlesque, and of course, films. For a time, it hosted radio performances by Gene Autry, who would go on to country-western music fame.Itwould change hands over the years, being renamed the Guild Theatre in 1960, then becoming a rock music venue called the Mad Hatter in 1969, where artists such as Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd performed. In 1981, it was converted to a showroom for Office Resources Inc. (ORI), an office furniture company. ORI moved its showroom and offices in 2018, after which Launch Louisville, a co-working space that hosts many small businesses, took over. If you get a chance to look inside, take that chance. I arranged a quick tour through Launch Louisville and was delighted to see the ticket office still on full display in the lobby. Walking into the theater’s shell through a balcony door, I felt as though I had walked into a mirror and emerged 100 years in the past. Box seats and the stage are clearly visible in all their glory, and at the top of the balcony the projection booth still holds two 100-year-old projectors, still aimed at the stage, frozen in time. I never wanted to leave.

6 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 VIEWS

The 113,800-square-foot building originally cost a cool $2 million to build, which isn’t chicken feed now and sure as heck wasn’t in the late ’50s. But the massive parking lots accommodated 700-plus cars, and a Sears spokesman in 1958 assured local media that the facility would offer “the latest in store architecture and design.” Adjacent Theiman Lane was widened and divided, and trafﬁc lights, which still exist, were added at Shelbyville Road to handle the resulting trafﬁc increase. Of course, if you go back into the 1800s, this part of town, which is now mostly shopping, restaurants and other commercial property, was part of a larger agricultural operation known as the St. Matthews Produce Exchange. As it happens, Louisville was the second-leading producer and distributor of potatoes and onions well into the 1900s, and it all went down in St. Matthews. Eat your heart out, Idaho. Sears eventually moved its St. Matthews operation east in 1984 to a two-story space in Oxmoor Center; after that, the former location became a revolving door of businesses, from a home improvement store to a Steepleton billiards and game store. Today, “the old Sears Building” is the home to many businesses, from a Dollar Tree to a laser tag room. In the hearts of St. Matthews residents, however, the building has only one proper heritage.

GO BACK IN ARCHITECTURAL TIME WITH ‘THIS USED TO BE LOUISVILLE’

While there were several former Sears, Roebuck & Co. locations in Louisville, including a well-known one at Eighth and Broadway, there’s at least one that seemingly everyone knows in general terms as “the old Sears Building.” Of course, it hasn’t been a Sears store in decades. The two-story building ﬁrst opened its doors to customers in late 1959 and was a modern destination for shopping because, as you may remember, Sears was where America used to shop for items like paint, window fans, and bedding. (I remember my grandmother would order from the Sears catalog over the phone and, a week or two later when she received a call from Sears that her order had arrived, would get dressed up to go pick up her new draperies or bath towels. It was a big deal to go to Sears back in the day.)

WHO IS THIS ‘ALBERTA STOLL’? Most Louisvillians are familiar with the Silver Dollar, the bourbon-bar-meets-honky-tonk in Clifton that used to be a fire station. But how much do most of us really know about the building’s history? Not a lot. One of the oldest intact firehouses in the US, the building was constructed in 1890 and originally was established for Louisville’s Hook and Ladder Co. No. 3. That weird inscription on the front that most pronounce “Alberta Stoll?” That’s actually in tribute to Albert A. Stoll, a lawyer and former Louisville alderman who originally was born in Philadelphia. When Stoll was young, his family, which was from Germany, moved to Louisville, where he was educated and graduated high school in 1870. As a young man, he went into politics, was a city alderman for many years, and earned a reputation as an honest official. The book “The History of Kentucky” says of Stoll, “His record has always been for a clean government, and against jobbery and monopolies, for which he has won the confidence and sympathy of the people.” (We could use more politicians like him, right?)

THERE’S A STORY IN EVERY GLASS OF WATER The science, engineering, history, and people who work hard to produce this essential resource. In Louisville, the water that’s delivered to your faucet everyday has a name – Louisville Pure Tap™. In 1997, Louisville Water became the first (and to date, the only) drinking water utility to trademark tap water. We gave our water a name to reinforce the quality and value of the drinking water, which most people take for Aftergranted.polling hundreds of residents and business owners, Louisville Water learned many see Pure Tap as a point of pride for our local community. Using their comments as a guide, we’ve given Louisville Pure Tap™ a refreshed look and launched a campaign to encourage residents and visitors alike to “Drink Like a Local” and share their local pride in our award-winning water.our award-winning water. SO, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO DRINK LIKE A LOCAL?

• You are saving the earth. By choosing to fill up at the tap, you reduce the need for single-use plastic bottles and help preserve our planet for generations to come.

• You can fill up all around town. There are more than 70 water bottle refill stations around the city. Fill up at the airport, Louisville Zoo, Lynn Family Stadium, University of Louisville and many more places.

• You’ve got great taste! Pure Tap was twice voted the Best Tasting Tap Water in America by the American Water Works Association and outshines bottled water in blind taste-tests.

• You save money. Did you know that bottled water costs over 1,500 times more than tap water? When you choose Pure Tap, you put money back in your pocket. Are you a proud Pure Tap™ enthusiast? We’d love to hear from you! Tag us @LouisvilleWater and use the hashtag #PureTapProud to share your local pride and show us how you’re staying hydrated. You could win our “Drink Like a Local” t-shirt! 550 South Third Street, Louisville, KY 40202 | www.louisvillewater.com

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 7

• You always have access to safe, highquality water straight from the faucet. Pure Tap undergoes 200+ dial tests and exceeds Environmental Protection Agency standards.

VIEWS COUNCILPERSON CHAMBERS ARMSTRONG: ‘VIOLENCE IN OUR CITY IS A CRISIS’ AND ‘WE NEED A PUBLIC-FACING CONVERSATION’ By Cassie Chambers Armstrong and Megan Metcalf | leo@leoweekly.com

So why are we white women writing to you today? As moms of preschool children, we know that our babies growing up in The Highlands are much more likely to see their high school graduation because of where they live. Every child in Louisville should have that opportunity. Yes, we have seen a rise of gun violence in our neighborhoods in The Highlands in the past year. It’s a reminder that we are all interconnected in this city. But we also recognize that each incident here has received outsized attention, while many other neighborhoods, predominantly and historically Black and poor, have struggled with violence for far longer, with far less attention and investment. The fact that some folks continue to push a narrative about violence in The Highlands, which is the whitest neighborhood in the city, underscores the underinvestment and disinterest with which we treat our neighbors in need. But the question for our city today is: What do we do about it? Candidly, there aren’t enough elected and appointed leaders asking these questions. We need a publicfacing conversation and a community-led Cassie Chambers Armstrong.

8 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 clients only. Not to be combined with any other offer. Up to 2 pets per household. Exp. 8/30/14. Cashier Code. 700.500 *For new clients only. Not to be combined with any other offer. Up to 2 pets per household. Exp. 8/30/14. Cashier Code. 700.500 Exp. 8/30/14. Cashier Code. 700.500 Wellness/Preventative care Dentistry • Surgery Grooming • Senior Pet Care GET A $25 FIRST EXAM!* *For new clients only. Not to be combined with any other offer. Up to 2 pets per household. Exp. 8/30/14. Cashier Code. 700.500 700.500 VCA FAIRLEIGH ANIMAL HOSPITAL 1212 Bardstown Road • Louisville, KY 40204 502-451-6655 VCAfairleigh.com www.vcafairleigh.com@vcafairleighanimalhospital@vca_fairleigh

WE KNEW IT before we lost Tyree Smith, but his death makes it harder to ignore: the violence in our city is a crisis. Almost 150 Louisvillians, including 20 children, have died from homicide this year; a number that is ﬁve times as high as it was 10 years ago. Another 460 people have been victims in non-fatal shootings. If you take a minute to sit with these numbers, names and faces, they are overwhelming. We know the effects of this crisis are not equally distributed, as evidence shows that violence disproportionately impacts our Black, brown, LGBTQIA and other marginalized neighbors. Let’s follow the leadership of our most impacted communities. Let’s elevate their voices and experiences.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 9

VIEWS plan for action. We aren’t going to accomplish all of that in this short article, and we know that our voices shouldn’t be the loudest on this issue. But we do want to use the resources we have to elevate what we are hearing from impacted communities. We know the most effective way to address violence is to address its root causes. Poverty’s impact on violence has the deepest and thorniest roots of all. Many markers of poverty — dilapidated structures, crowded households, unemployment, unsafe housing —are strongly correlated with violent crime. Anti-poverty interventions have to be a part of the solution. Access to universal pre-K decreases violence. Things like access to housing, transportation and economic mobility help as well. If we could wave a wand and eliminate poverty, Louisville would be a much safer (and more just) place. We also have to invest in solutions that give parents and kids the resources they need. Studies show that home nurse visits for prenatal and postnatal care have a dramatic impact at reducing adverse childhood events. In fact, the kids in these studies were less likely to be involved in crime 15 years later. Another set of studies show that therapeutic interventions — working with kids and families — leads to a host of better outcomes and is cost-effective for society. But just talking about upstream policies isn’t enough right now. Upstream interventions, by definition, take years to flow down and have an impact. We don’t have that kind of time; kids are getting shot right now. You probably think that this is where we pivot to make a police-on-every-corner argument. Don’t worry; we aren’t going there. We don’t think that adding a police officer to every corner is the solution. In fact, data supports that many “tough on crime” interventions — for example, moving juveniles to adult court — actually leads to more crime. Children in the adult criminal justice system are also eight times as likely to die by suicide and five times more likely to be sexually assaulted. Of course, practically speaking, policebased interventions aren’t even a possibility right now. Our police department has 300 fewer officers than its allotted capacity, representing a 23% reduction from its full staffing level. That isn’t going to change anytime soon, as it takes almost a year for a new officer who enters the academy to complete the training requirements. That means that we have no choice but to look at non-police solutions. So what are those solutions — those immediate things we can do today to meaningfully impact violence in the short term? One data-driven idea is to immediately and significantly invest in our marginalized communities. Studies show that built environment changes — like mowing vacant lots and investing in home repairs — can reduce violent crime and assaults. And listen to the community’s leaders and the residents of neighborhoods most impacted by gun violence: they are asking for that investment. More street lights, more attention to vacant and abandoned properties, more places for families to bring their children in the neighborhood, more public events in neighborhoods to give neighbors a chance to meet each other in a safe, supported space. More community centers for kids to go to during out of school time, more access to summer jobs, more educational opportunities. More parks, more grocery stores, more affordable housing. This isn’t about throwing up some landscaping and hoping that it will address violence. It’s about correcting for decades of systemic disinvestment in neighborhoods and people. We also must continue the work being done by our city’s Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods. This department is doing some of the most important and impactful work, including organizing community events and responding to gun violence. That department’s Ambassador Program trains people on the CDC Public Health Approach to violence, community organizing, suicide prevention and conflict resolution. Everyone reading this article should go to the webpage and sign up for the training.Atthe end of the day, all of this boils down to building community and supporting it. We have to create spaces to build relationships and empower individuals. We are lucky that we have tools to do this in an unprecedented way, as we have $350 million American Rescue Plan dollars that we can spend to invest in both upstream and more immediate interventions. With the right political will, we can choose to spend money on data-driven solutions like the ones we’ve talked about here. It sounds trite to say that this is a problem that will take all of us to solve. But my colleague Councilman Jecorey Arthur said it best: “everyone in Louisville is responsible for Louisville.” We are tired of the inaction and finger-pointing. Let’s work together to get something done.

SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 Highland Community Ministries child care is hiring • Opening position for Full and part time positions • Age group: 6 months to 5 years old • Located in the heart of the Highlands. • Benefits( sick leave, vacation, holiday paid,) • No weekends or night shifts • Pay: $13 • Paid training, classroom supplies, breakfast and lunch is offered each day. • High school diploma and must be 18 years old. For More Information email dspillane@hcmlouisville.org or call (502)458-3045 or (502)458-8723 shopsassyfoxconsign.comfashionforwardwithoutspendingafortune New Hours Tue–Fri 11–5 pm Sat 10–4 pm 502.895.3711 150 Chenoweth Ln

• Cassie Chambers Armstrong is the Metro Council representative for Metro Council District 8; Megan Metcalf is the legislative assistant for Metro Council District 8.

AGO FOR BEING GAY. HER LAWSUIT WAS FINALLY SETTLED THIS MONTH.

When police chief Erika Shields used the bus stop shooting death of Tyree Smith to immediately advocate for school resource o cers in JCPS, some took her statements as a desperate search for a solution made in an emotionally charged moment. Nope, turns out Shields has thought this through and really believes police o cers are the proper cure for youth violence. She doubled down in her comments in a video posted to social media on Monday, Sept. 27. As council member Jecorey Arthur tweeted, “link me to successful SRO programs.”

THE WORST, BEST & MOST ABSURD THORNS&ROSES

Alicia Pedreira.

Pedreira’s firing jumpstarted a legal saga and a lawsuit that was settled earlier this month, with a promise from the state government that they would stop the religious proselytization of children living in tax-payer funded, residential child care homes.Sunrise Children’s Services, which operates those types of homes, has appealed the settlement, which would prevent them from providing children with religious materials without the child’s permission.Today,much has changed for Pedreira. She is 58, working for Habitat for Humanity and not in a relationship with the woman who she started this journey with — partially because of the stress of the arecently,back-and-forthnectedsaidForlawsuit.years,Pedreirashehasfeltdiscon-fromthelegalthat,untilborehernameasplaintiff.And,alawsuit she personally filed against Sunrise Children’s Services — to stop them from refusing to hire other openly gay employees — was dismissed years ago. But, she said that the recent legal victory was a more important battle to be won. “If an adult wants to live in the closet and have internalized homophobia and not deal with it in the 21st century, it’s like OK, well then do that,” she said. “But, you’re an adult. These kids are the ones that need protection.”LEOspoke to Pedreira for her thoughts on the recent settlement that started with the loss of a fulfilling job. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

LEO: I want to ask you about your job at Kentucky Baptist Homes. How did you feel about that job while you were there? Alicia Pedreira: I had just graduated with a master’s degree in art therapy. I would have been working at the La Grange mental hospital, but I wasn’t an art therapist there. I’d gotten a job as a chemical dependency counselor, and I was doing that. I had interviewed at Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children prior to graduating, and I couldn’t get the job then, because I wasn’t licensed. Dr.[Jack] Cox, well he wasn’t doctor then, but Dr. Cox kept my resume, because he really liked me. I really liked him. And after I graduated, he called me and offered me another interview, and pretty much was giving me the position if I wanted it, because it could be under the umbrella of another therapist. So that’s how I wound up going over there. And, I liked it because I had a lot more freedom and to do art therapy if necessary. I ran groups; I had individual therapy. So, I was learning a lot in one spot with behavior, just like boys in particular. Dr. Jack Cox, who was amazing — such a nice man, is such a good teacher — and that’s why I left the job at La Grange, because I felt like I could really learn a lot under him. And my co-workers were great. Everyone knew I was gay, because I had told them in the second interview when I thought, hey, you know, maybe I’m gonna get this job, and I don’t want to be fired. And I, you probably read this before, but I said, and it was prophetic words, ‘I don’t want to be hired and then be fired six months from now, you know, because I’m gay.’ And I didn’t really deal with the administration. That building was separate. So I didn’t see anybody, any administration portion of it really until everything hit the fan. So, your firing, how did that feel to you especially since, you know, even before you were hired you said

ROSE: BESHEAR’S BATTERIES Kentucky received some hopeful economic news on Monday when it was announced that Ford Motor Co. is planning to build battery manufacturing plants in Hardin County that will power the company’s electric vehicles. The $5.8 billion plan is expected to create 5,000 full-time jobs. Production is set to start in 2025. A nice get by the governor.

Pedreira was working as a family specialist at a group home operated by Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, now Sunrise Children’s Services. But, that ended when a photo publicly emerged of her and her partner at the time.

ROSE: PUBLIC HEALTH IS METAL Louder Than Life, a major music festival with an enormous crowd, took place last weekend, and we were glad to see they took the health screenings seriously. Patrons had to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test from the previous 72 hours to even get to the box o ce or gate. After Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady declared the gigantic Lollapalooza not to be a superspreader earlier this summer after implementing the same health measures, most festivals have copied the idea. And we’re glad that Louder Than Life was one. Plus, we all got to see Metallica perform the entire Black Album on Sunday.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 11 NEWS & ANALYSIS SHE WAS FIRED MORE THAN 20 YEARS

THORN: DOUBLING DOWN ON A BAD IDEA

By Danielle Grady | leo@leoweekly.com MORE THAN 20 years ago, Alicia Pedreira was ﬁred from her job after her superiors learned she is a lesbian.

ROSE: IF A MONKEY CAN DO IT WHY CAN’T YOU? The Louisville Zoo is now vaccinating some of its animals for COVID-19 with a specially formulated cocktail for animals. No sheep are being jabbed, just apes and wild cats. Given the anti-vaxxer’s obsession with ivermectin, maybe this will lead to vaccine-hesitant humans clamoring for the leopards’ preferred COVID cure.

Jokes aside, some animals are now better protected from COVID-19 than humans. Most of the people who are hospitalized for and dying of COVID in Kentucky are unvaccinated. Let’s use our evolved brains to realize that means getting vaccinated is worth it.

12 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 NEWS & ANALYSIS you didn’t want that to happen? I was angry. I was sad. I was angry, upset. I don’t think I was embarrassed. Because, I think had I been embarrassed that I lied and or had been silent, you know, lied by omission, I would have put my tail between my legs, and said, ‘You know what, I lied; they found out; I’ll just be quiet and find another job.’ But, because I was honest, I felt like, this is not fair. And I’m going to talk about it. I’m going to fight back. Why did you decide to get involved in the lawsuit? [A] couple of things, probably, you know, that perfect storm. My girlfriend when [she] was in the picture. At that time, her name then — she’s changed her first name since then — but her name then was Nance Goodman, and Nance was the fairness volunteer coordinator for the Fairness Campaign. I might add, she was brilliant, is brilliant. And she was indignant. I mean this was, you know, she had a child. He was, what? Seven, I think, at the time. You know, we had a house together. So, something that she wanted people to know, and I’m gonna repeat, because she was right, is that this just didn’t happen to me. It happened to her. It happened to her son. You know, it affected more than just me. So Nance said, if you want to fight back, let’s write a letter and send it. This is the time of just, you know, AOL. There really wasn’t much else — no, certainly not social media as it is today. So she wrote a letter, and it was a beautiful letter, and she sent it to every pro-LGBTQ+ institution, organization, religious or otherwise, and we just sent it. She sent it to them and said, ‘Send this on. Keep passing this letter.’ And in that letter it said, ‘Write to Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children. Tell them how you feel about this, and that it’s wrong, and just inundate them.’ And that letter went around the world, because we had people from Australia that would write us, since she put our email on there. [We had people] from Australia, from England, from, well, just all over the place, Asia. Just people saying, ‘This is terrible. We support you. We’ve written to KBHC.’ And something I found out later, was they had to hire a person to handle all the emails that were coming in about this. And the reason I know that is because somebody told me about him, and I called him. Because they told me that he was quitting because he couldn’t handle reading all those emails and working for them. He just didn’t want to work for them. So, I called him, and I thanked him. I said, ‘You know, I know it’s really hard to read all that. Especially if you agree with what they’re saying. So, I appreciate you and appreciate what you did, and I appreciate you leaving in protest.’ Because he made it known that that’s why he was leaving. How much of a presence in your life has this lawsuit been for the last 20 or so years? With the law, you know the saying: the wheels of justice glide slowly. No kidding. It’ll be on a docket; We’ll be waiting for a year, and then it’ll be waiting for three months, and then Kentucky Baptist Homes will say, ‘Oh, we need to extend that.’ So, they’d extend it for 60 days, and then they’d say, ‘Oh we have to have this,’ and then extend it 60 more. And before you know it, it’d be two years before anything happened again. And then suddenly, I would get emails or phone calls from attorneys from the ACLU or [Americans United for Separation of Church and State] or Arnold & Porter, you know saying, ‘Hey, this is what’s happening, and da da da da da.’ And then they’d send me the writs or whatever, so I could read and sign off on it or whatever. So, sometimes it was fast and furious, and then it was nothing, and I mean nothing for months or years. So, sometimes I really was involved, and other times, I just didn’t, I

With the law, you know the saying: the wheels of justice glide slowly. No kidding. It’ll be on a docket; We’ll be waiting for a year, and then it’ll be waiting for three months, and then Kentucky Baptist Homes will say, ‘Oh, we need to extend that.’

Your Met Gala has arrived... Visit

Do you have any hope that eventually something will happen to where Sunrise Children’s Services can’t discriminate against their employees, or that maybe the state doesn’t rely on that organization in the future? I don’t think that the religious organization will ever change their mind about that. And that’s their right. I guess that’s what the law said, that they’re free to do that. OK. But I do think that the state, I would love for the state to not rely on religious organizations to do their job, because, you know, they contract out that, and that’s part of the problem. Like, even with all these nice words that if they are done, if they are followed, would protect the children, my concern is that they’re not followed, which is why we want monitoring to come, you know, to continue. Under this agreement, this is supposed to start again. Without that enforcement, it’s just worse. You know, so to me that’s the most important thing, sure I’d like the state not to depend on them. If a social worker has kids that come to them — and they do all the time — who are, you know, who are in need of placement, and they only have four, ﬁve places to place them and only two have beds, and one of them is Sunrise Children’s Service —if it’s down to two, and Sunrise says, ‘Oh, I have a bed.’ I mean, it’s ridiculous to say that the social worker is going to be like, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to send them there.’ Well, you know, that’s crazy. That’ll make their job that much harder, and the kid’s in limbo. We already have a lot of that, even with Sunrise Children’s Services; we still have lots of children who are waiting for beds. So that’s wrong. We should have a state that invests in the health of their children. • I don’t think that the religious organization will ever change their mind about that. And that’s their right. I guess that’s what the law said, that they’re free to do that. OK. But I do think that the state, I would love for the state to not rely on religious organizations to do their job, because, you know, they contract out that, and that’s part of the problem.

Paid$16.50CustomerBecomewww.itelinternational.com/JeffersonvillejobsaluxuryretailServiceAgent.perhrandup+bonusandbenefits.training.itel_Jeffersonville

NEWS & ANALYSIS mean, you know, ﬁve years later I didn’t care. I would be like, ‘What? Why are you bothering me now?’ Because, quickly, I gave my name to this, and so did the other plaintiffs, and quickly within a year, or I’d say a year and a half, it no longer belongs to me. It is now in another universe called, you know, the lawyer universe. The settlement does not — it’s not going to protect LGBTQ+ workers at Sunrise Children’s Services from being ﬁred like you were. But I spoke to Chris Hartman with the Fairness Campaign; he feels as if it might protect LGBTQ+ children by protecting them from proselytization. What are your thoughts on that? I think that’s the most important part to me, because, the kids, they have no choice, and they’re detained. They are detained and under constant care, and, you know, they can’t do things freely there. They have to ask permission; they have to, ect. ect., So, to force somebody to do something, it’s not right. And those are the most vulnerable. As adults, if you want to work there and be gay and be in the closet, I don’t get that. I live my life out loud. And a lot happened because of this lawsuit, mostly. I made up my mind that I would not be silent anymore. Even though I didn’t really live in the closet. Everybody knew I was gay, but it wasn’t something I really like, put a banner out. But afterwards, I was like, you know what, I’m gonna put up a banner, and I’m going to get a tattoo. I mean, I just decided I would live out loud. So if an adult wants to live in the closet and have thatThesethat.it’swithhomophobiainternalizedandnotdealitinthe21stcentury,likeOK,wellthendoBut,you’reanadult.kidsaretheonesneedprotection.

14 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

FOUR DAYS after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a little more than an hour before a police cruiser would be set ablaze near the spot where she had been standing in downtown Atlanta, police chief Erika Shields stuck out in her crisp white uniform amid the sea of Likeprotesters.otherparts of the country, Atlanta was boiling on May 29, 2020. In the days since video went viral of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck on the street outside Cup Foods, passionate protests had become fiery riots in Minneapolis. Early that morning, gas mask-wearing state troopers had handcuffed a Black CNN reporter and his crew while they were live on air. The night before, in Louisville, an unknown assailant shot seven people during a protest downtown calling for justice in the killing of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman shot and killed by LMPD officers during a botched raid of her south Louisville apartment in March. President Donald Trump was threatening to use the federal government’s might to quell the spreading unrest. On that Friday night, the downtowns of many American cities — eerily empty for more than two months due to the pandemic — were suddenly full of protesters marching against police violence, the contagious energy of the movement radiating from the heartland to the coasts.

Why does it take so long for people to get arrested when they [kill] an unarmed Black man? “I’m the ﬁrst one to say it was bullshit. [Chauvin] shoulda gone to jail that day.”

By Josh Wood | Photos by Jon Cherry This story was produced by Louisville Magazine. For more, visit Louisville.com.

The protesters in Atlanta and Louisville — sparked by the killings of Floyd and Taylor — were part of what would come to be regarded as potentially the largest such movement in U.S. history. On the relatively quiet sidelines of the Atlanta protest on May 29, Shields, who became APD’s chief in late 2016, spoke to a reporter from the local CBS afﬁliate, calling Chauvin —who had knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes — “a really cold son of a bitch,” adding that the value of Black lives had been diminished in this country. Standing outside the CNN Center, she told the reporter that the Atlanta protest was “as orderly as something like this is going to be” and that she didn’t want it to turn into an “arrest fest,” as that would just make things worse. Soon, Shields’ presence on the ground attracted the attention of protesters, who jostled against one another to pepper her with questions and frustrations.

AFTER RESIGNING AS ATLANTA’S POLICE CHIEF, SHE CAME TO LOUISVILLE SEEKING ANOTHER CHALLENGE. WITH SURGING HOMICIDES AND AN UNTRUSTING PUBLIC, SHE’S FOUND IT.

THE REAL

Are police going to use tear gas today? “We’re not looking to use tear gas. My ass wouldn’t be standing here if we were looking to use tear gas. I’m here to hear you.” The commander-in-chief of the land says, ‘When there’s looting, there’s shooting.’ Why don’t we have any convictions? “That’s not my guy. That ain’t my guy. I said — I said Trump is not my guy, all right?” He’s not your commander-in-chief? “No,” she said, laughing and shaking her head.In a video released the day before, Shields said what had happened to Floyd was WHO IS SHIELDS?ERIKA

murder — almost 11 months before Chauvin was convicted of murder — and that the anger and fear on the streets was justiﬁed.

A mass of protesters soon converged on the CNN entrance, with some scaling the massive letters now covered with graffiti. About an hour after Shields left, some started smashing police cruisers parked on the street, battering them with metal crowd-control barricades, skateboards and fists. A few climbed onto vehicles and stomped windshields with theirAtfeet.about 8:05 p.m., somebody set an already smashed-up police cruiser on fire. A shirtless man with a police riot shield spray-painted ACAB — All Cops Are Bastards — hopped on top of the burning vehicle, triumphantly raising his plunder to cheers as smoke rose over downtown Atlanta and flames licked out of the vehicle. On the door of the burning cruiser, was the police department’s seal: a phoenix emerging from an inferno.Alittlemore than two weeks later, Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot and killed in a Wendy’s parking lot in Peoplestown, a neighborhood south of downtown Atlanta. The police had been called because Brooks was asleep in his vehicle, blocking the fast-food restaurant’s drive-thru. As two APD officers attempted to arrest him, Brooks, who appeared to be impaired, wrestled a taser away from one of them. After Brooks discharged the taser while trying to run away, one of the officers, Garrett Rolfe, opened fire and hit Brooks twice in the back. Brooks later died of his injuries at a hospital. Following the killing, the Georgia NAACP called for Shields to resign, saying her department “continues to terrorize protesters and murder unarmed Black bodies.”

(Shields was preceded by two interim chiefs, Robert Schroeder and Yvette Gentry.) After Shields’ unveiling, the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police — which represents all sworn LMPD ofﬁcers, save for the chief and deputy chief — released a statement saying the organization was “cautiously optimistic” about Shields’ appointment but took exception to her belief “that race plays any part in LMPD investigations.”

Shields arrived in a Louisville where

While talking about Floyd’s death, she said, “These ofﬁcers didn’t just fail as cops; they fundamentally failed as human beings.” She said the police force hires people who represent society, which means sometimes the worst parts of society end up on the payroll. She said the ofﬁcers deserved to serve prison time for what they had done. For the police chief of a major American city — largely a fraternity known for circling the wagons in the face of harsh criticism — the video was a remarkable statement.

If the aim was to calm anger in Atlanta, though, it didn’t work. Now Shields was standing in the middle of a large protest trying to have conversations about policing and inequity, amid chants of Fuck the police! Fuck the po-lice! Behind her, an officer well over a head taller than her watched her back. In front of her, a protester with an assault rifle slung in front of his chest offered her a business card so they could have a conversation later. She told the protesters she didn’t want people to go to jail for “stupid shit” like possessing weed, jaywalking, drinking in public. She said police had to understand who criminals were: people who had guns and were shooting other people. She talked about the need to overcome economic and racial segregation in Atlanta. She said officers had been too lenient with employee misconduct. A white protester lowered the broken surgical mask he was holding up over his nose and mouth to start telling Shields about how police were meant to be protectors of the people. His point was lost as he stopped talking, recoiled and fled as chaos engulfed those surrounding Shields. It was a mad stampede of retreat, reason unknown — a hallmark of those early days of protest. As some sprinted and some froze and tried to comfort one another in embrace, officers’ hands reached out to grab Shields and guide her past the giant red-and-white CNN letters outside the cable news giant’s headquarters and take her into the building.

“I knew it was going to be problematic. How problematic, I wasn’t sure,” she tells me in July during an interview at LMPD’s training academy. She adds she had already been thinking of stepping aside “for unrelated reasons” but does not elaborate. By the next afternoon, she was gone. Later, grumblings in Atlanta suggested the mayor forced her out, but Shields says it was her decision. “I knew that for me to stay would be a distraction,” she says. Her three and a half years as chief over in a ﬂash, Shields stayed on the city’s payroll for a while, working as a project manager on the IT side of policing — things like APD’s computer-aided dispatch system that routed 911 calls; a records system that managed police reports; and upgrading the video integration center, which captured 10,000 video feeds from across the city. Shields didn’t have a background in computers (she doesn’t even use social media) but knew how to manage.“WhenI stepped aside, I took a couple of months and I just — I didn’t turn on the TV news, didn’t look at the internet,” she says. “I really enjoyed [the IT job]. It helped me get out of a really dark space, because I loved Atlanta, I loved the Atlanta Police Department. It’s my home. And I really didn’t like how it ended.”

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 15

If you’re going to police fairly and equitably, your practices have to be consistent, and your standards have to be consistent regardless of the Shields’neighborhood.”rhetoriccouldn’t have drawn a starker contrast with Louisville’s last permanent police chief, Steve Conrad, who had pushed back against accusations of racial bias in LMPD’s policing and, according to documents obtained by WDRB, said he had never “pondered” whether young white men and young Black men were treated differently in the city. Conrad was ﬁred days into Louisville’s 2020 protests when David McAtee, a Black man who owned a barbecue restaurant, was shot dead when LMPD and National Guard soldiers, enforcing a curfew, moved into the West End, about 20 blocks away from the protesters downtown.

As she processed and decompressed after her tumultuous end as APD chief, she started getting offers to work for smaller departments and, in her words, “less-conflicted” departments, as well as the private sector, where criticisms are rarer. “I was really grateful, and the stuff that was being presented interests me, but I knew I wasn’t there yet. I still wanted to be in a position where I could really help mentor and bring forward the next generation of police leaders,” she says. “And the only way to do that is to be a chief of police in an agency that’s in the mix.” Eventually, she was contacted by the Police Executive Research Forum, which was conducting Louisville’s search for a permanent chief following the firing of Steve Conrad in June 2020. Shields had never been to Louisville. “I knew they had good, I won’t say great, basketball and football teams. I’d always heard it was a really nice city, and that it’s like bourbon capital of the U.S. — which, I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I’d always heard really nice things about it,” she says. Her first visit to Louisville came in winter 2020, when cold and Covid gave the city a desolate feel. But she saw the personality of neighborhoods and fell in love with the architecture of Old Louisville. The city oozed character that Atlanta’s new builds lacked. “I love just driving around, looking,” she says. “And I want to go in like all of these old, creepy buildings and walk around, which is probably not the best idea.” Her partner, Amy, pushed a little to move to the northeast or California, but Shields told her she’d like Louisville. On Jan. 6, national news of Shields’ hiring as LMPD’s new chief was muted by the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob egged on by the outgoing president. Locally, however, Black leaders involved in the protest movement were appalled by the decision to hire Shields. On Twitter the night before Shields’ hiring was officially announced, prominent Louisville activist Hannah Drake wrote, “In Louisville we are dealing with the murder of #BreonnaTaylor. You know what my city decided to do?

Less than a day after the shooting, Shields stepped down. In a short statement at the time, Shields said her resignation was the result of “a deep love for this city and this department” and that she had faith in Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Bottoms said Shields had resigned “so that the city may move forward with urgency in rebuilding the trust so desperately needed throughout our communities.” (Bottoms selected Rodney Bryant, a Black man who had retired from APD after more than 30 years on the force, to replace Shields.)

Hire [Erika] Shields as the new police chief. Yes, that [Erika] Shields, the police chief that resigned after the murder of Rayshard Brooks. PRAY MY DAMN STRENGTH!!” Shields, who is now 54, was the unanimous choice of an eight-member panel, which was made up mostly by people of color. Her hiring came at the end of a sixmonth search in which none of the other 27 candidates were ever named, a level of secrecy that stoked distrust among critics. For some, it was insulting that Shields was hired at a time when Louisville had not even begun to heal from its own traumas inﬂicted by police. To others, her decision to step down in Atlanta when things got hot represented a failure in leadership. Speaking from a podium inside Metro Hall on the day she was announced as the new chief, Shields struck a tone that echoed what protesters and their supporters had been saying and shouting: Racial disparities exist in Louisville policing. “This doesn’t happen to white people. It just doesn’t,” she said that day, referring to Breonna Taylor’s killing. “If we really are doing this fairly and impartially, why is this not happening in white communities? And don’t tell me that it’s because Black people are where the crime is, Black people are where the violence is. That’s crap.

Addressing the ﬁring at the time, Mayor Greg Fischer, citing the fact that body cameras hadn’t been activated, said, “This type of institutional failure will not be tolerated.”

The racial-justice protests and unrest that had quieted in Atlanta as the death of George Floyd grew more distant were rekindled when news broke of Brooks’ death. The night Shields stepped down, the Wendy’s where Brooks had been killed was burned down and protesters blocked an interstate in dramatic scenes. Shields received the call about the shooting in the middle of the night.

16 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

Gwinn-Villaroel, Black and from Atlanta, allowed Shields to see the city through a different lens. And they just had chemistry, which, sitting in a 1984 Cutlass together for long stretches of time, was necessary. They were close, but Shields was also hiding part of herself from Gwinn-Villaroel, who was religious, often preaching to prostitutes they arrested, and from the Black community, which Shields considered intolerant toward gay people at the time. In her TEDx talk, Shields recounted the night she came out to Gwinn-Villaroel. “I can remember clearly that it was night, that we were in some crappy, unmarked car on a crappy side street — actually, trying to catch a rapist; that’s the good part we were doing. And I just thought: I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted from expending energy trying to keep this relationship upright. But I’m not being honest. So I tell her: ‘You know what? I’m gay.’ I ﬁgure we’re not getting the rapist, we may as well turn it into something. And what I should have seen at that time, Jackie just — she had A command sta meeting at LMPD headquarters.

Working undercover, Shields and GwinnVillaroel formed a strong bond. “We taught each other; we were yin and yang,” GwinnVillaroel says. “I like to say for Erika and myself, what she lacked was my strength, and vice versa. We fed off one another.”

partisans of both the protesters and the police were skeptical, if not openly hostile. She came to a severely understaffed department that went through bouts of “blue flu” in 2020, to a city with a murder rate spiraling out of control, with its 173 homicides in 2020 — a nearly 90 percent surge over the 92 killings in 2019. (The city is set to surpass that grim record in 2021.) A city outsiders historically associated with Muhammad Ali and horses was now a byword for police killing Black people, mentioned in the same breath as Ferguson and Minneapolis. A department that, within months of her arrival, would be subjected to a wide-ranging investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, stemming from the killing of Breonna Taylor, LMPD’s response to protests and accusations of biased policing. A city where every move, every word, would be under a microscope. Who would want that job? To those who knew they were police officers, they were Ebony and Ivory, two undercovers — one Black, one white — rolling through the impoverished streets of Atlanta in clunkers while working narcotics and prostitution operations. Sometimes, they’d stand in the street in, to hear Shields describe it, “booty dresses” purchased at Goodwill, waiting for johns to bust. “I was not very good. Jackie (Jackie GwinnVillaroel, aka Ebony, her partner) was the better prostitute,” says Shields, who was nicknamed Ivory. The neighborhood they worked was nearly entirely Black. Prostitutes on the beat were about 50-50 Black and white. But the johns were a clearly defined demographic: mostly white men from the ’burbs, driving into a rough part of town to score cheap sex. “Almost to a person they all told me they were seeking quick sex that they didn’t feel right asking their wife for,” she says of the men she arrested. “This was in the middle of the crack epidemic. We weren’t call girls. I mean, I was healthy, but the people standing next to me, these folks had sores on their mouths. This stuff was bad.” She says the experience taught her things, for one: Men are transactional, women are emotional. “It was really very interesting to me. It helped me understand, it helped me do my job better down the road,” she says. Working as a cop on the streets of Atlanta was a world away from the life Shields had known. Raised in rural, small-town (and almost all-white) upstate New York, Shields went to Webster University in St. Louis, getting a degree in international studies in 1990. She then struck out on a career as a stockbroker, moving to Boston. It was not a good fit. “I realized one day when I was sitting in the office that I just hated it. I was bored,” she says. “And I can’t stand being bored.” (Asked if her IT job with the city of Atlanta after she stepped down as chief was similarly boring, she quipped, “Even being a stockbroker seemed more interesting at that point.”) Law enforcement had always intrigued Shields. And if she was going to switch careers, she might as well change locales and get away from Boston’s punishing winters. “It wasn’t the most intellectual of decision-making processes,” she says. In 1995, Shields, then in her late 20s, joined the Atlanta Police Department. In a 2018 TEDx talk, Shields recounted coming to Atlanta to interview for a job she didn’t get and seeing how different it was from the life she had lived so far, saying, “So I come down for this job interview and I’m on this corporate elevator, high-rise, and I’m going up, and I can remember this like it was yesterday: On either side of me are African American males, good-looking, in threepiece suits. And it hit me at that moment that the only Black individuals riding the elevator with me back in Boston in my corporate high-rise there were the cleaning people. And I knew then that my circle had a lot to be desired. And I knew then that I wanted to be in Atlanta. And I knew then that if I was going to ever drive change — that in my heart of hearts I felt needed to be driven — I had to become better educated.”

After moving to Georgia and signing on with the police department, she struggled to understand accents on 911 calls. But the city felt welcoming. After a few years of working on patrol — that is, responding to calls — she worked undercover in south Atlanta’s Zone 3, a place that was, according to Lou Arcangeli, APD’s deputy chief at the time, “very intense — high calls for service, lots of poverty, lots of problems.” Of Shields, he says, “She clearly was a diminutive-in-size female, but she had a big personality and all the cops liked her.” A lot of the energy on the beat went toward people buying and selling crack cocaine: busting down doors in drug busts, picking up jaywalking prostitutes on possession charges and doing controlled buys. “At the time, oh my god, I loved it. It was an adrenaline rush serving drug search warrants, locking somebody up who had the drugs on them,” she says. “At the time I enjoyed it. I didn’t know better.” Decades later, Shields says she had gained a broader perspective on addiction and the failures of that kind of policing. When the opioid epidemic arrived — and was comparatively seen as a publichealth crisis — Shields saw racial disparity in how it was treated. “We got into the heroin-opioid crisis — that directly mirrors crack — and yet the rules of enforcement are markedly different,” she says. “And it is no coincidence that it’s related to race.”

Protesters downtown Louisville during the marches for Breonna Taylor.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 17 no issue with it. She immediately wanted to run my dating life and boss me around.”

A no-knock warrant obtained under questionable circumstances. A shot fired as police breached the door. A salvo of return gunfire. A dead Black woman. Before Breonna Taylor there was Kathryn Johnston. Johnston was at home in northwest Atlanta when the police showed up to execute a no-knock raid on the evening of Nov. 21, 2006, two days before Thanksgiving. They’d come to the 92-year-old Black woman’s house after a suspect, on whom officers had planted marijuana, pointed it out to avoid going to jail. (He said he’d seen a drug dealer there with cocaine inside when he went there to buy crack.) In applying for a warrant, officers said they needed a no-knock raid because the suspected drug dealer had surveillance equipment. Johnston lived in the Bluff, a neighborhood with a reputation as a high-crime, open-air drug market; Johnston’s home had bars over its windows and doors, and she’d been given a .38 pistol by a relative to protect herself. It took some time for officers to get through the bars on her front door — enough time for Johnston to retrieve the old gun and fire off a shot as they breached the door. In response, officers fired 39 shots, hitting her five or six times and killing her. After the shooting, officers planted marijuana in her basement to try to cover their tracks. The killing of Johnston would eventually see three officers sent to prison on state and federal charges. Their suspect-turned-informant had seemingly picked out the home at random, fearful he’d be locked up after officers demanded a tip and threatened to charge him with dealing drugs. After the killing, the officers colluded to get their story straight.

Today, Gwinn-Villaroel, now LMPD’s deputy chief, has been shuttling back and forth between Louisville and Atlanta, where she remains a pastor. In Shields’ ofﬁce at LMPD headquarters downtown, I asked her if she had ever faced adversity in law enforcement because of her sexual orientation. She said women face issues as police because they’re women, and that her obstacles didn’t have to do with her being gay. She brought up a time when a supervisor had a conversation with a male partner of hers. “A supervisor asked him: ‘So tell me, you’re fuckin’ her, aren’t you?’” she recalls. “And ironically, when I came here, I had an almost-verbatim conversation with one of the females here; the same thing was done to her. It’s just one of those assumptions where, if you’re female, you’re going to be promiscuous, that you can’t just have the professional relationship.”

Another confidential informant police had previously used would later come forward and say police got in touch with him after the killing, telling him to say he did a controlled drug buy at Johnston’s home before the warrant was secured. When charges were announced, Fulton County’s district attorney called the killing “one of the most horrific tragedies to occur in our community,” adding that investigators showed that “the practices that led to her death were common occurrences” of the APD narcotics unit involved. The killing of Breonna Taylor more than 13 years later differed in that it was her boyfriend who fired the shot and that nobody was charged in the killing. But to Shields, the two killings have “dramatic similarities.”

The Johnston killing — as well as a 2009 raid by a tactical narcotics unit at a gay club, the Atlanta Eagle, where ofﬁcers allegedly used homophobic slurs and found no drugs

Shields saw LMPD’s widely criticized, heavy-handed response to the protests last year as problematic as well. “You do have to allow for wide latitude when you’re dealing with something as emotional as what we saw last summer,” she says. “The arrest numbers I found to be quite high.” Between May 29 and Sept. 28 of last year — the height of Louisville’s protests — the city saw nearly 900 protest-related arrests, according to documents obtained by the Courier-Journal.

18 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 @leoweekly

— created a stinging black eye for the police department. Those incidents “probably set us back decades in terms of trust factor with the community,” says Jeff Glazier, who served as Shields’ deputy chief in Atlanta. For Shields, still years away from being chief, the incidents were formative, preparing her for what was to come in Louisville in the wake of the Breonna Taylor killing and the protests that followed: the denials of wrongdoing, the refusal to take responsibility, the constant scrutiny, the urgent need to change the department’s culture. “It was scripted for me because I’d lived it,” Shields says. “It opens up the floodgates. Everything’s being scrutinized and lawsuits are being slapped on you like yellow sticky notes. And so, I knew the path that LMPD was going to go down and I thought: This is a department that has to change, because we cannot have major-city police departments committing infractions such as this.” In Atlanta, she witnessed a policing culture in which higher-ups pressured those beneath them for results without making sure officers were getting those results lawfully. “That’s what I see coming here. I think there was a lot of that: Get those results,” she says. Atlanta in the late aughts showed her that police can lie. On the raid of the gay club, she says the police department’s posture was that the Eagle was a seedy bar and that the officers did nothing wrong. In reality, she says, police had targeted the gay community without any probable cause. I asked her if, as a gay woman, that felt personal at the time. “The police culture is so strong,” she says. “I firmly believed the police.” Shields watched the George Floyd video. An alert popped up on her phone and she clicked on it and watched. She feels an obligation to watch such videos, so she can try to understand the climate of the country, to spot any training deficiencies at play, to be able to understand law-enforcement issues beyond her jurisdiction. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I watched it, and I thought: That just can’t be right. And I watched it again. Literally, I had to sit down. I just could not believe I was watching that. It was just that appalling. I wasn’t even processing it through my police lens.”Amy, her partner, entered the house and asked what Shields was doing. Shields just pushed the phone to her; Amy couldn’t make it the whole way through. Shields knew protests would follow (“Rightfully so,” she says), but she didn’t anticipate their size, spread and longevity. I asked if she would have called what happened to Floyd murder right away if it was her own officers involved. “Oh, for sure,” she says. “I think George Floyd was so shocking and appalling. I mean, who in their right mind is going to think that was rational? Even by misconduct standards, that was an outlier. I still can’t get my mind around it, quite honestly.” It wasn’t until she stepped down as chief in Atlanta that she had time to read more about Breonna Taylor’s killing. She remembers how it felt odd that the killing had happened months beforehand. “I was heartbroken,” she says. “I saw a young lady who was dead who should not be dead. There’s no two ways about it: It was because of the decision-making of a police department she was dead.” I asked Shields where blame lies in Taylor’s killing. “I would put the bulk of the responsibility on the individuals who secured the warrant,” she says. (The warrant that resulted in the raid of Taylor’s Springfield Drive apartment was tied to a narcotics investigation involving Jamarcus Glover, an ex-boyfriend of Taylor’s. In applying for the warrant, detective Joshua Jaynes said postal inspectors had verified that Glover had been receiving packages at Taylor’s residence; they had not. Jaynes was terminated in January for lying in obtaining the warrant.) In the aftermath of the killing, Shields saw the missteps continue. Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, was left frantically waiting for 10 hours for news on her daughter before learning Taylor was dead. Shields says a “lack of leadership” was on display at the scene. And in the days, weeks and months after, LMPD clammed up and closed ranks instead of being transparent and taking ownership of mistakes that occurred the evening Taylor was killed. In a press conference, former chief Conrad described Taylor as a suspect. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was charged with attempted murder of a police officer — charges that would later be dropped under scrutiny.

LMPD’s response has attracted federal attention, with the wide-ranging DOJ investigation into the department also looking at whether LMPD ofﬁcers used excessive force against protesters. In July, former LMPD ofﬁcer Cory Evans pleaded guilty to federal charges for a 2020 incident in which the government says he struck a man in the head with a riot stick while the protester knelt with

“It’s not even so much how we police; it’s that we police differently depending on the color of the community.”

In 2019, after an APD officer on an FBI task force shot and killed Jimmy Atchison, a 21-year-old Black man, as he emerged from a closet he had been hiding in, allegedly to surrender, Shields moved to outfit all of her officers on federal task forces with body cameras. When the feds refused to allow cameras on their task forces, Shields pulled her officers from them. In Louisville, where officers did not turn on their body cameras during the killing of David McAtee and were part of a unit that was not required to use body cameras during the raid on Breonna Taylor’s apartment, Shields says staffing is too tight right now to allow for a dedicated team to audit body-camera footage like she did in Atlanta. But she says they are keeping an eye on body-worn camera usage, while also acquiring technology that will enforce usage. “I feel as though the compliance is good, but I also know that we’re not where we should be,” she says. “If an officer’s camera is not on during a serious incident, you’re going to have problems.” In more “egregious” incidents, Shields says, officers will face problems not just with the police force, but with the judicial system. In the nearly $196-million 2022 police budget approved by Metro Council in June (more than any other city department’s budget), Shields included a system that automatically turns on body cameras whenever an officer draws their firearm. There is no firm timeline on its implementation, but Shields hopes to have it up and running early next year.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 19

In Atlanta, Shields was also a partner in setting up a community-led, pre-arrest diversion program, which gave ofﬁcers the option of calling on social workers instead of arresting individuals for actions that resulted from mental illness, addiction or low quality of life. This could include someone causing a disturbance by shouting outside a downtown restaurant or disrobing and bathing in a public fountain or, like the folks Shields locked up back when she was a plainclothes street cop, having a small amount of drugs in their pocket. Moki Macias, executive director of Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, says, “The constant

I asked her if she believes LMPD would have made the decision to break up a nonprotest crowd violating curfew in a whiter, more afﬂuent neighborhood — if what happened to David McAtee could have happened in the East End. “I would say, just based on my experience with human beings in America, that the answer in every city would be no. And I think that’s the core of what’s wrong with law enforcement.

A man sitting by the Je erson Monument in downtown Lousiville during the protests.

his hands in the air, surrendering to arrest. In an interview in June, Shields told me she expects more federal charges — particularly charges for actions by police on the night David McAtee was killed at his barbecue restaurant at 26th and Broadway, across the street from Dino’s Food Mart. Soon after LMPD officers and National Guard soldiers moved in to disperse a non-protest crowd gathered in violation of curfew, in the early moments of June 1, 2020, LMPD officer Katie Crews began firing pepper balls in the direction of people in front of McAtee’s restaurant. As patrons retreated into his kitchen, McAtee stepped into the doorway and fired a pistol twice (what his family’s attorney said were warning shots into the air), prompting LMPD officers and National Guard members to fire back, with a National Guard soldier killing him with a bullet from a M4A1 assault rifle. (McAtee’s family has said he would never intentionally fire at police.)

Shields says the firing of pepper balls at 26th and Broadway the night McAtee was killed “really jump-started the chaos that ensued” and characterized it as the result of the decision-making of one individual. “I think you’re going to see that there had been a culture that had allowed for last summer to really go sideways on multiple fronts,” she says.“There was decision-making by individuals — not even commanders — that was very unprofessional,” she says. “Whether it’s firing paint balls at people or smoke balls or whatever the hell they were firing at them when you certainly didn’t need to, or hitting people in the head when they were allowing you to handcuff them.”

Shields would go on to introduce strict penalties for those who failed to activate their body cameras. That kind of discipline isn’t “particularly popular,” said Dean Dabney, chair of the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University, but “she kind of had a way of standing up in front of people and saying: ‘I understand that’s not popular — here’s why I did it. We’re not going to continue to be unsuccessful in our mission.’” And the discipline yielded results. Jeff Glazier, Shields’ deputy chief in Atlanta who left the department in 2020 and now serves as chief of police in Ponce Inlet, Florida, a small coastal town just south of Daytona Beach, says, “As soon as we started handing out written reprimands, and one- and two-day suspensions, then you can kind of see the culture change and people were turning their body cameras on when they were en route to their calls. And it worked. You can see the complaints go down, you can see the use of force go down.”

In January 2020, Ty Dennis, then an APD officer, was moonlighting as security at a nightclub when he was called to respond to the scene of a nearby shooting. Driving to the scene in his personal car, he says he forgot to turn on his body camera when he arrived. “I got dinged for it. But I wasn’t mad at her for it; I’m man enough to take responsibility for my own actions,” he says. For the rest of his time with APD, he was not allowed to work side jobs — jobs that help pad the incomes of many officers. Despite the discipline, Dennis says Shields gave off a feeling that she had officers’ backs. Sometimes, she’d leave thank-you notes or gift cards on his desk to show appreciation. “It’s just like a football coach: If you’ve got your troops behind you, you’ll run through a wall for your coach. And when you see that your coach or your chief has your back, like she did and like she does, it makes you want to go harder for her because you know she’s appreciating it.”

When she took over in Atlanta she saw problems, too — and turned to discipline and reform to try to solve them. For one, she worried ofﬁcers weren’t using their body cameras. Shields, who describes herself as a “huge proponent” of body cameras, ordered an audit, which revealed ofﬁcers were routinely violating the body-camera policy and failing to activate their devices.

Cannabiswww.onelovehempdispensary.comwww.onelovedelta8.comProducts for the Cannabis Community Over 70 Years of Combined, Cannabis Expertise Cannabis Company 1906HighlandsBardstown 502-409-9410Rd 3223JeffersontownRuckriegelPkwy502-365-2068 Clarksville, In 1400 Main Street Bolt+Tie 812-557-6550Building www.gummygirl.fun Visit our booth at Kentuckiana Pride Fest!

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 21

22 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

In a memo obtained by the Atlanta JournalConstitution, Shields said the terminated ofﬁcers were “good people and good cops” who made mistakes. She also said the decision to charge six ofﬁcers was politically motivated and that she would not “sit quietly by and watch our employees get swept up in the tsunami of political jockeying during an electionWhenyear.”Shields was tapped to be Louisville’s chief, among those who criticized the city’s decision were two protest leaders, pastor Timothy Findley Jr. and Shameka Parrish-Wright, both of whom have since launched runs in the 2022 mayoral race.

Parrish-Wright says, “To me, you can say one thing, but do your actions match that? So, you know what to say because you come from Atlanta, which has a larger Black population than we have.” (Regarded as a Black mecca, Atlanta is more than a third African American, and Shields was the city’s ﬁrst white police chief since 1990. Louisville, by comparison, is about 22 percent Black.) “She says one thing, but we still have someone that was beat up right outside our Hall of Justice by police for simply standing out in the street with a cross,” Parrish-Wright says, referring to the April arrest of protester Dee Garrett. Parrish-Wright says, if elected, she’d ask Shields why she should keep her on. (Craig Greenberg, the former CEO of 21c Museum Hotels who has raised the most money in the mayoral race so far, says LMPD still has work to do and that he would like to see the organization be more transparent. He says he’s “rooting for her to succeed” and that “her success is the city’s success.”)

Councilwoman Jessica Green, who represents west Louisville’s District 1 and who was on the board that interviewed and selected Shields, was impressed by her ability to talk about race and the history of policing. “It was refreshing to have a chief speak about these issues without biting their tongue, who had real-world and life experiences,” Green says. “She just rose to the top at every level of the interviews. She was sort of three levels above every other person that we

While Shields’ rhetoric in both Louisville and Atlanta has been met with skepticism, others see her worldview as rare for a major city’s police chief. “You’d be hard-pressed to ﬁnd a more progressive chief in 2021 America than Erika Shields,” says Dabney, the Georgia State University criminal justice department chair. “I don’t think the city of Louisville could have made a better choice.”

Metrointerviewed.”Council president and former Louisville police ofﬁcer David James also was on the committee, and when he saw Shields’ résumé and bio, the ﬁrst thing he thought of

challenge that we had was the culture change needed inside the department. There had to be structural changes within the department that would create incentives to divert people from arrest.” Over the first two years of the program, which began in 2017, Macias says just 150 diversions were made while there were likely thousands of arrests for low-level offenses that could have been diverted. This year, the program has launched a number that members of the public can call instead of 911, bypassing police altogether for appropriate issues. As part of the reforms Louisville announced in the aftermath of the killing of Breonna Taylor, the city said it would explore creating a diversion program similar to the one in Atlanta and other cities. The University of Louisville is working with the city to study how to implement such a program, which is months away at the earliest. Shields envisions a deflection program routed through 911, with dispatchers trained on how to direct calls and whether to get cops or a deflection team on the scene. “We’ve seen police across the country shoot people who have no clothes on — explain that to me,” Shields says. “At that point I’m like, ‘I don’t even want a cop out there.’”

Back in January, Findley considered how Shields had been chief in Atlanta when Brooks was killed, telling NBC News her hiring here was “mind-blowing.” Today, he says, it’s still too early to tell how Shields is doing. “I think that it’s difﬁcult to give a rating — passing, A+ or anything like that — because our city hasn’t changed,” he says. What Shields says about race and policing is a departure from Louisville’s last police chief, Findley says, but adds that’s somewhat expected in the wake of protests, a time when Netﬂix added a Black Lives Matter section and the way many Americans talk about race has shifted. “It creates a great story for her to say those things, but the problem is, the words have to line up with action,” he says. “There has to be substantive change and action behind those words.”

To Shields, when people say “defund the police,” they are actually calling for something she wants as well: more resources for social services. “I think there are people who truly believe: abolish police. I think the more common meaning I’ve encountered is: People want more money put toward social services,” she says. “And I do think there has to be far greater investment in social services if we’re ever going to get a handle on the underlying issues.” Shields was not without criticism in Atlanta.Tiffany Roberts, community-engagement and movement-building counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, first met Shields in the context of setting up Fulton County’s pre-arrest diversion program around 2015. Her first impression was that Shields was open-minded on ways to prevent people from entering the criminal legal system. Her opinion of Shields changed when Deaundre Phillips was killed just weeks into Shields’ tenure as chief. The 24-year-old Black man was shot and killed by APD officer Yasin Abdulahad on Jan. 26, 2017, when he accompanied a friend picking up documents at a police annex building. Abdulahad and another officer, both in plainclothes, had approached the car Phillips was sitting in after, according to Abdulahad, they smelled marijuana. What followed remains a unclear, but after talking with the officers outside the car, Phillips re-entered the vehicle through the passenger side and was followed through the same door by Abdulahad; as Phillips drove away with the Abdulahad in the vehicle, Abdulahad fired a shot and killed him. It remains unclear what exactly happened, and security-camera footage later contradicted Abdulahad’s version of events — notably, that he was being dragged by the car when he fired. In the spotlight for the first time, Shields criticized the lack of transparency surrounding the shooting while also describing the officer involved as “widely respected.” “She completely failed to respond in a manner that was compassionate,” Roberts says. “She avoided the family for quite some time.” Roberts started to see a difference between the image Shields presented and how the APD operated. “I think there is a difference between Erika Shields the spokesperson, the public figure, and Erika Shields the leader within the police department,” Roberts says. “Erika Shields the spokesperson is working really hard to align her image with that of Atlanta, which is considered to be a progressive city. But I think Erika Shields the leader within the APD did very little to change the culture of the Atlanta PoliceColumbusDepartment.”Ward, a longtime Atlanta activist and community leader in Peoplestown, the neighborhood where Rayshard Brooks was killed, was also critical of Shields’ time as APD chief. “I expected more than what we got,” he says of her response to the killing of Brooks. “I expected her to step up to the plate and talk about what’s going to be some new…initiative of the police department to make sure this kind of stuff doesn’t happenShieldsanymore.”alsofaced backlash for her handling of the protests in Atlanta. While she viewed LMPD’s 2020 protest response as heavy on arrests, APD initially outpaced their counterparts in Louisville: Through June 6 of last year, at least 170 had been arrested during protests in Kentucky’s largest city, while 532 were arrested in Atlanta according to local press reports. (Louisville’s figures eventually surpassed Atlanta, but large-scale protests here continued throughout the summer and into the fall.) In a May 30, 2020, incident that quickly went viral, body-camera footage showed APD officers using tasers on a young Black couple after breaking one of their car windows. The college students had gone out to get something to eat before getting caught in traffic resulting from the protests. Police enforcing a curfew confronted them. Shields and Atlanta’s mayor reviewed the footage and determined that two of the officers should be fired for excessive use of force. Within days, the Fulton County district attorney charged six officers in the incident.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 23 “We love o ering LEO Weekly at Half Price Books. Alt-weeklies are important in every city and our shoppers love their arts and music coverage.” Tory Herron, Kentucky District Manager. Half 10220BooksPriceWestport Rd, Louisville, KY 40241 (502) https://www.hpb.com/097326-8585 If you'd like a LEO Weekly rack at your business, email distribution@leoweekly.com

But recruiting and keeping officers is difficult. Attitudes toward policing — and a stained reputation for LMPD after years of criticism — can be off-putting for candidates. FOP members overwhelmingly shot down a proposed salary that would bump up pay. “The members listened to their chief say that the LMPD should be the highest paid police department in the state. The proposed agreement does not accomplish that goal,” the FOP wrote in a statement. Currently, recruits in LMPD’s 26-week training academy earn just under $40,000, while graduates start at about $50,000. The proposed contract would have boosted first-year pay to $51,000. The Mayor’s Office said guaranteed raises every two years would mean a recruit joining the force now could expect to make $65,000 in two years’ time.

The number of homicides on the whiteboard keeps climbing higher. It’s at 85 today, June 11, but will soon hit 100. Today is the day Kentucky is lifting coronavirus restrictions. Tourists are back downtown, wandering out the doors of 21c in search of lunches and posing with the giant baseball bat in front of the Slugger Museum. Life in Louisville feels a little like it’s returning to normal — like it was before the pandemic. But things are not normal; Louisville is on pace to shatter its homicide record, set just last year at 173. Before 2020, the most homicides Louisville had seen was 117 in 2016. By late-September, Louisville will have seen at least 151 criminal homicides this year, with 21 of the victims under 18. A few blocks away from the bustle of Museum Row, LMPD headquarters is mausoleum quiet. The halls feel like an elementary school while class is in session. The front door to the Brutalist building is locked, so I’m let in from an alley. Inside, Shields sits at the end of a conference table in her wood-paneled ofﬁce with a laptop and a plastic Nalgene water bottle. Binders and ﬁles are piled up around her. Atop the stack sits the book “Life Behind the Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930.”

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum — the ﬁrm the city hired to ﬁnd candidates — says Shields “speaks her mind, and she calls it as she sees it. She doesn’t suffer fools.” Wexler says he has seen other chiefs handle incidents similar to the killing of Rayshard Brooks “badly” by withholding videos, being deceptive and shifting blame. After Brooks’s killing, Wexler says, “When we talked, she said: ‘I need to own this.’” Green says, “Listen to her. She’s talking differently than any chief we have ever had.”

24 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 was how she went into the streets to talk to Atlanta protesters. “I thought: She’s got that much going for her because Steve Conrad certainly never would have done that,” he says. During the interviews to ﬁnd LMPD’s next chief, James says, “Everyone picked Shields as No. 1. She was just saying all the right things.” James recalls how Shields discussed the history of policing and how policing relates to African Americans and other people of color — something he says none of the other candidates did. “She recognized it, she knew it — I knew it because I was a police ofﬁcer and I’m Black,” James says. “The fact that she recognized that and knew that spoke volumes to me.”

While Black drivers were more likely to be searched, contraband showed up only 41 percent of the time, whereas it showed up 72 percent of the time when white drivers were searched.“Removing someone from the vehicle and searching them or the car should be the exception, not the norm,” says Shields, who added that cops need to make clear that they’re looking for illegal guns, not weed, and ensure that most traffic stops result in “mostly positive” interactions with the community. Returning to that kind of policing requires careful monitoring to make sure racial disparities don’t exist, she says. “If your division is 90 percent white people and I see that 80, 70 percent of your traffic stops are Black people, I can drill down and see, OK, who’s doing these traffic stops?” she says. “It only takes a couple employees to really make things go sideways.”

Demetrius Latham, a former officer who left LMPD earlier this year and who has been a lecturer at U of L, says, “There is no benefit to you as a police officer to go out there and engage in proactive policing — no benefit whatsoever.” Then there is the introduction of intelligence-led policing: identifying the people and groups responsible for driving violence in the city and targeting them. Closely related to that is something called group-violence intervention — essentially talking to people at a high risk of becoming a victim or a perpetrator. The strategy sounds simple but is full of pitfalls. “Proactive policing” — doing things like making traffic stops to make contact with the community and try to find illegal guns — has been a major source of friction between the African American community and police. While the killing of Breonna Taylor was the reason for the 2020 protests, those protests were also about racial disparities and inequities in the city. The feeling that African Americans were targeted when behind the wheel helped drive anger on the streets, and there was no shortage of Black protesters who said they’d been unfairly treated by the police. And it’s not just a feeling that the community was targeted: A 2019 Courier-Journal analysis of traffic stops between 2016 and 2018 found that African Americans, while constituting just 20 percent of the driving-age population, represented a third of the stops and 57 percent of searches.

Shields has started having senior officers — herself included — go out on patrols to lead by example. But being proactive when short 300 officers is difficult, says Dave Mutchler, spokesperson for the River City Fraternal Order of Police, which represents nearly all of LMPD’s roughly 1,000 sworn members. “We are undermanned to the point that we are going from call to call, from run to run, and those proactive measures that we can take in the violent parts of the city — that time simply doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. Gentry sees the officer shortage as the single biggest obstacle facing the department. While it’s a challenge, she says it’s also an opportunity. “The people that sign up to do this job now are fully aware of the expectations; you can really set the tone for them,” she says. Having such a large chunk of the force vacant — more than 20 percent — “is an opportunity,” she says, “to really select and shift and mold and cultivate the type of officers you want out there representing your agency.”

Demetrius Latham, the former LMPD officer, says the force is not only competing with other departments for officers but also with the private sector. For officers like him who joined LMPD after having a civilian job (he worked in insurance and took a pay cut to join the force), LMPD’s pay and benefits can be low and the lure to leave can be high. “You could go work in the private sector — you know, an insurance company, a factory even, a warehouse — and you can make $40,000, $45,000 and have decent benefits and nobody wants to hurt you for doing your job,” he says. “Postal workers are making good money delivering the mail and nobody wants to hurt the postal person unless they don’t have their checks on the first of the month.”Less controversial than proactive policing is Group Violence Intervention, or GVI, a program that, when pioneered in Boston in the 1990s, resulted in the “Boston Miracle” — a 63-percent drop in youth homicides and a 30-percent drop in overall homicides in just one year. In Louisville, the plan is twopronged: to identify and target members of gangs, while also having conversations with those involved with or on the peripheries of violence to provide them with a potential escape route so they don’t end up locked up or dead.Theidea is that the act of starting a conversation — getting those involved in crime to understand they can be charged and arrested if they are not killed by rivals first — can reduce violence. It is also based on the premise that a very small percent of a city’s population is responsible for an overwhelming share of the violent crime. Basically: If you can get through to members of that group and get them to stop — either by coercing people or, if they refuse to stop, by arresting them — violent crime will drop.

Former interim chief Yvette Gentry, who served in the role for three months before Shields took over in January, says trafﬁc stops are an essential pillar to a proactive-policing strategy. “The guns are getting there in cars. People are not necessarily walking down the street with guns,” she says. “Some of these scenes that we have, they’re ﬁring 100, 200 shots. They’re coming in cars to do that.”

As far as officials go, Shields is easy to talk to. She can be surprisingly candid, especially for somebody in the typically guarded world of police. She curses. She smiles slightly when listening. She seems more likely to admit problems than to double down, or dance around and deny, as is so often the case with officials. She’s observant, calling me out when my eyes move to her office whiteboard, which includes the number of homicides and what looks like a list of investigations. Over the five months I spent reporting on this story, LMPD was constantly in C-J headlines: LMPD chief pushes for police on campuses - JCPS board member calls remarks ‘reprehensible’; Rep. Scott files suit on LMPD officers - Daughter, activist also suing over protest arrest; ‘I want justice,’ protester says - Arrest video shows man being punched by officer; Will salary hike keep cops on the force? Smaller departments offer more pay, less stress. On this day in June, Shields has been on the force for almost five months, enough time to settle in, so I ask her about her hardest day so far. She isn’t direct now, saying it’s easier to ask her about what day hasn’t been difficult. “I’ve struggled with the number of children who are being shot and killed or who are shooting and killing. That for me as a whole is what’s weighing the heaviest,” she says. To slow the bloodshed, Shields says, first officers need to start being proactive again — something she says they have been reluctant to do, even before the killing of Breonna Taylor, for fear of becoming the next viral face of police misconduct.

Tim Findley, the protest leader and mayoral candidate, says, “When I hear proactive policing, I would ask: How is that different than stop-and-frisk? How do you deal with the fact that there may be ofﬁcers out there who are racially proﬁling and now they can hide behind that notion of proactive policing?”

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 25

In a July episode of On the Record, LMPD’s semi-regular podcast, officer Ivan Haygood, whom Shields says runs point on LMPD’s GVI program, said his team reviews fatal and non-fatal shootings to identify persons who have a high probability of retaliating. Then they go talk to them. “I’m coming to talk to you. And I’m coming to talk to you either at home, in the hospital or on the street,” he said on the podcast. “We go to the hospital, and we talk to John. ‘John, how are you doing? First of all, how is your recovery?’ It’s a very simple and pointed conversation.” Haygood added: “We find out what makes John go. Come to find out, John has a little girl. John still has his mom. John still has a wife. And I says: ‘Are they worth living for? Are they worth finding a different path?’ Because you can’t go back to the path (where) it’s either death or prison.”

To Gentry, the interim chief before Shields, the city’s failure to properly invest in violence-prevention efforts — things like the Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods — has led the city to its current level of violence. “As a city over the past decade, we have half-heartedly funded a lot of the prevention efforts that could have put us in a better position than we are today with violent crime,” she says. “People talk about a path away from violence, but it has to be real.”Shields does see limits to how much success these strategies can have — in part because of how many illegal guns are on the streets, a symptom of what she sees as overly lax gun laws in Southern states. “The gun laws make it hard because obviously when so many people can own guns legally, it allows for many stolen guns,” she says. “As a result, the volume of illegal guns is far greater than it is up north.” (Reporting by the Courier-Journal earlier this year found that, between 2014 and 2019, nearly 10,000 guns were reported stolen in Louisville and more than 1,000 of those firearms were recovered at crimeShieldsscenes.)saysanother roadblock is the judiciary, which she says releases violent offenders on low bonds. “I think, realistically, we’re in a place where judges don’t have much sympathy for police,” she says. In one of her YouTube podcasts in September, Shields mentioned a “broken system” where people committing violence are handed “abysmally low bond, no bond (or) they’re put under house arrest. So the reality of it is, repeat violent offenders tend to get back out and right back in the game.” Both to me and on her podcast, Shields has highlighted the case of Laron Weston, a man police apprehended in south Louisville after he allegedly shot two women. Police say he later aimed his gun at officers as they moved in to arrest him. In a five-and-a-half-minute arraignment in July, Weston received a $10,000 bond by District Court Judge Anne Haynie. “How do you get your arms around violent crime when someone can shoot two women and be out, I don’t know, 12 hours later?” says Shields of the case, in which she claims LMPD had to petition the feds to intervene and bring charges so Weston would not be released. Haynie, the judge involved, disputed Shields’ characterizations of the case, saying Weston already had a federal hold on him and was never at risk of being released. Furthermore, Weston was being placed on home incarceration, which Haynie says has proven to be a safe system. “Judges aren’t policymakers. We have to apply what the statute says. We don’t make legislation. We don’t do any of that,” Haynie says. “If the police department has a concern about what judges are doing or about the statute, they need to take that to the legislators because they’re the ones that make the law.” Jefferson County’s chief public defender, Leo Smith, called Shields’ criticisms of the judiciary “inappropriate, inaccurate and irresponsible. At best, the chief’s remarks are cynical, misinformed and misleading. At worst, they threaten the independence of the judiciary and compromise its integrity by attempting to undermine confidence in the courts and trying to politicize the judicial decisionmakingDespiteprocess.”theobstacles facing LMPD in combatting crime, deputy chief GwinnVillaroel says, “I do believe that we can see a decrease in homicides — I have this crazy faith. We have to, because we’re losing too many.”OnFacebook in early September, LMPD somewhat unexpectedly declared a degree of victory. An LMPD newsletter posted to the Facebook page stated that, as a result of its new violent crime detail — focused on encouraging proactive policing and being active in the city’s deadliest 2nd and 4th Divisions in the West End and south Louisville — the pace of violence in the city was slowing. It cited a citywide “69% Reduction in the Rate of Homicides” (not to mention a 95-percent reduction in the 2nd Division). But if you follow homicide numbers in the city, the claims were eyebrow-raising: The 19 homicides in August and 15 in July were lower than the year-leading 23 in June and 20 in May, but those numbers aren’t indicative of a 69-percent drop. With a minimum of six homicides in the 2nd Division over July and August, according to LMPD’s weekly homicide reports, a 95-percent reduction there over a two-month period seemed unlikely. It is unclear how LMPD calculated the rates or what time frame it was referring to. However, on a podcast released Sept. 8, Shields, without citing any numbers, said data showed that there had been a “dramatic reduction in the rate of homicides” where the violent crime detail was active. (LMPD did not respond to repeated requests for clarification on the claims. While LMPD granted three interviews with Shields between May and July, as this story’s publication neared spokespeople for the department would not answer any follow-up or fact-checking questions. WAVE-3 also reported that LMPD did not respond to attempts seeking clarification to questions on the homicide reduction statistics.)Longtime anti-violence activist Christopher 2X, who heads the local organization Game Changers, says LMPD’s statements about the reduction in the homicide rate have left him “perplexed.” Even if homicides were limited to 10 per month — which has not happened yet this year — 2X points out how that would still equal 120 homicides for the year, more than the old 2016 record of 117. The last time the city saw a monthly homicide figure in the single digits was in April 2020, almost 18 months ago. “We are in territory we’ve never been before,” 2X says.

Eight months after activist Hannah Drake posted that late-night tweet about how upset she was by the news of Shields’ hiring, she remains unhappy with the city’s decision. “I will always feel like that was a slap in the face to Black people, people of color, white people — everybody — that were protesting against this,” she says. “And you bring in the very person who was in charge when somebody was shot in the back in Atlanta. It makes utterly no sense. Quite frankly, I don’t think that does well for the community, and I don’t think it did well for the police department.”Inthedays before this year’s Kentucky Derby, concrete barriers blocked off the parking lot of the Kroger on Broadway, one of two supermarkets in west Louisville, and near where David McAtee was killed a year before. The placement of the barriers forced the Kroger to close early. The rest of the city remained open as preparations for Louisville’s first real Derby in two years were underway. The placement of the barriers brought swift anger, feeling to some as if LMPD was openly policing Black neighborhoods differently than their white counterparts. Shields would later say the early placement of the barriers was the result of a “miscommunication.”ButtoDrake,theincident was indicative of Shields not being the one calling the shots, indicative of, despite her words, LMPD continuing its actions as it always has. “The fish rots from the head, and she’s not the head. It’s other people controlling your department,” Drake says. To others, though, LMPD is changing. David James, the Metro Council president and former Louisville police officer, says LMPD was set on a course of fundamental change the moment Shields took over. “It’s like night and day having a real police chief and a fake police chief,” he says. Under Conrad, James says, a culture at LMPD emerged in which officers could do what they wanted with little worry of repercussions. “It became a culture of: cover things up, don’t let people know about things,” he says. “And so now, when you hear reporters or media or just people talking about this transparency issue with the police department, that’s because Conrad was the main transparency obliterator. Because he didn’t want the public and the media to find out about the things that were going wrong (with) the police department.” James adds that changing that culture could take years.Appearing in front of Metro Council’s Public Safety Committee on Sept. 15, Shields stressed that LMPD had to change — that it had no option but to change. “Do you want to be a part of an organization that is continually reading about its employees indicted?” she asked. “Reading about the DOJ coming in to turn everything upside down? You’ve done it your way. Guess what? It’s not worked.” She went on: “It’s a mistake to think — in any law-enforcement agency — that you can dig in your heels, have it be the way it was 20, 25 years ago and you’re going to be unscathed. The world’s moved on past you years ago. And that’s why law enforcement’s in the space it’s in. The world’s moved past us and we’re still back in the wooden bleachers.”

“It gives no relief to safety in the community when we stay in double-digit homicides on a monthly basis.” In late July during our last interview, at LMPD’s training academy near Churchill Downs, I ask Shields about how local and national stories involving LMPD still frequently have some version of the line “LMPD did not respond to requests for comment,” despite her emphasis on the importance of “Liketransparency.what?Gimme one?” she shoots back quickly. I come back with the case of Maj. Aubrey Gregory, the training-division commander demoted for using racist language, and a short April documentary released by Vice that investigated the killing of David McAtee and provided the most intimate look so far at what happened on June 1, 2020. “I’m concerned if somebody comes to me who’s reputable. I can’t say I felt that with them,” Shields says of Vice. (Just before the McAtee documentary came out, Vice correspondent Roberto Ferdman and his team won a prestigious George Polk award for television reporting for their coverage of the killing of Breonna Taylor.) On Gregory’s demotion, she says LMPD had been immediately clear about what happened by saying that the ofﬁcer had used a “racially inﬂammatory term” and also about the discipline faced. (At the time he was demoted, Shields said he’d used “inappropriate and offensive language” — the racial nature of which was not revealed until a Metro Council meeting weeks later. In the meantime, LMPD kept tightlipped about what had transpired.)

26 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 people122,000readLEOWeekly

If hearing Shields talk — how racial disparities exist in policing, how “defund the police” really just means more money for social services, how police culture can turn toxic — evoked a radically transformed LMPD, the cold silence of not even a “no comment” from public-information ofﬁcers evoked the old way of doing things.

•

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 27

By Carolyn Brown | leo@leoweekly.com

andisNeonTodrickturedSaturday’sLGBTQgenerationsmultipleofguests.fea-actsincludeHallandTrees.HallaperformerYouTuberwho has racked up numerous Broadway credentials in shows like “Kinky Boots” and “Chicago.”

He also co-executive produced Taylor Swift’s music video “You Need To Calm Down,” which stars a number of other LGBT celebrities, including Billy Porter, RuPaul and Ellen DeGeneres. Neon Trees, whose lead singer, Tyler Glenn, is gay, is a band known for energetic, feel-good pop hits like “Animal” and “Everybody Talks.” The lineup also includes performances from 1980s pop star Tiffany, known for the singles “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Could’ve Been,” as well as DJ Spinderella from the 1990s hip-hop group SaltN-Pepa. There will also be a number of performers from the Louisville area, including Cover Me Badd, the Louisville Gay Men’s Chorus and Ladrea Maria, who will take the stage throughout the weekend. The full schedule is not available yet to the public, but guests can check the festival website in the coming weeks for more information.

havetimes,we’re“Evenpeople,”ingalways“Pride’sapart.soliberat-forsomanyheadded.thoughstillindarkwecanstillasafeevent and enjoy one lineupentertainmentanother.”Thisyear’sincludes high-proﬁle performers that were chosen to appeal to

After A

LOUISVILLE’S LGBTQ community is long overdue for the opportunity to celebrate love and identity together in person. Although the Kentuckiana Pride Festival was postponed, then canceled, in 2020, then postponed earlier this year, it has since been rescheduled a ﬁnal time and will run on Friday, Oct. 8 and Saturday, Oct. 9, on the Big Four Lawn downtown.Thefestival will take place from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Friday and noon to 11 p.m. on Saturday. General admission weekend tickets are $10; single-day general admission tickets are $5. VIP tickets range from $70-150 and include perks like drink tickets, private viewing areas, food, and a VIP bar.

Cancelled

There were more than 20,000 guests at the last Kentuckiana Pride Festival in 2019, and Coffman told LEO that festival attendance always “grows and supersedes what we had planned” each year. Even with certain COVID-related restrictions in place this year, he is conﬁdent that the community will be drawn to an event like this after spending the last year

Festival guests will be able to experience many of the same draws that they always have: there will be a parade at 7 p.m. on Friday, which will start from Market and Campbell Streets and end at the festival grounds on the Big Four Lawn. There will be more than 125 vendors selling food, clothes, accessories and more; in fact, the festival received more vendor applications this year than they were able to accept, which they consider a very positive sign. Of course, there will still be the hallmarks of a world trying to recover from the pandemic — guests at the outdoor festival will need to present evidence of a vaccine or a recent negative COVID test to enter. Masks won’t be required, but they will be strongly encouraged and will be available for free throughout the event space. While hand sanitizer stations will be available and most “high-touch” surfaces will be disinfected frequently, one area, the Family Fun Zone, has been overhauled entirely: rather than having inﬂatables and activities that would normally put children in close proximity with one another, event staff will hand out activity bags instead, which kids will be able to use during or after the “Wefestival.still want to encourage safety, but we want celebration to continue,” said Rodney Coffman, president of the Kentuckiana Pride Foundation. “That’s basically what people have been telling us over the past nine months. We want this. Make it safe. We need to have something fun, something joyful, something to celebrate.”

While the main events of Kentuckiana Pride will only happen on Friday and Saturday, the Pride Foundation will offer other events for the LGBTQ community before and after the festival itself. Chill BAR Highlands, a gay bar on Bardstown Road, will host a kickoff party on Thursday, Oct. 7, then a post-Pride cookout and drag show on Sunday, Oct. 10. The Pride Foundation has also hosted or sponsored events over the last year –– Family Day Out at the Zoo, Drag Story Time on Zoom and more –– to help the community keep up the momentum amidst so many postponements and cancellations. (The Kentuckiana Pride Festival is not the only one of its kind to have been offset by the pandemic; another large local Pride event, the Louisville Pride Festival, went digital in 2020 and was cancelled for 2021 just a few weeks ago.) In early October, though, festival guests will be able to enjoy each other’s company once again underneath a flurry of rainbow flags. After a year and a half of stress, sickness and separation, that multitude of rainbows will be a fitting symbol for the LGBTQ community’s long-awaited hope of gathering together in safety and joy. • Kentuckiana pride parade from 2019.

KentuckianaYear, Pride Festival Returns

—LEO Weekly

Portland Art And Heritage Fair

Going into its eighth year, the Portland Art and Heritage Fair is once again heralding the arts and culture of this little river neighborhood. The theme of the fair this year is “full circle.” In addition to their usual juried art show, the fair is promoting Ed White’s “River City Drumbeat” documentary and will be hosting an outdoor screening of the lm. There will be the usual fête du jour events with booths, tours, art workshops, musical performances and more. There will also be a dedication of new stained glass by Bob Market at the museum. A major piece of the art fair will also be held this weekend — the Almost 5K run will have its third race. —Erica Rucker

FRIDAY, OCT. 1-3 St. James Court Art Show

Portland Museum | 2308 Portland Ave. | portlandky.org | Free | Noon - 5 p.m.

Nappy Roots plays Friday at 9 p.m. and the Prince Project plays Saturday at 8 p.m.. —Erica Rucker NEON

Big Four Station Park | Pearl and Chestnut Streets, Je ersonville, Indiana | Search Facebook | Free | 7-11 p.m.

FRIDAY, OCT. 1-2

STAFF PICKS

St. James Court | 1387 S. Fourth Street | stjamescourtartshow.com | Free | Times

Foxhollow Farm | 8905 Highway 329, Crestwood, Kentucky | foxhollow.com. | $12 for ages 13-20, $40 for adults (includes drinks) | 5 p.m. The nal weekend of the Sunset Concerts at Foxhollow Farm is here. Friday, Oct. 1 features Bridge 19, School of Rock and Kentucky Wild Horse. NOLA jazz meets Americana, rock, old time and swing make this a night for your dancing shoes. On Saturday, Oct. 2, Backseat Tambourine, Zach Price and The Dive will treat the audience to pop melodies, acoustic covers and reggae rock. Adult tickets include drinks from the bar, with non-alcoholic options and alcoholic including kombucha, Modica Mocktails, as well as cocktails, wine and craft beer. Blankets, lawn chairs or comfy outdoor cushions are welcome. Seating is rst come, rst served. Tents and umbrellas are permitted, but Foxhollow requests that you place them on the perimeter of the natural farm amphitheater to allow maximum visibility to blanket guests.

—Erica Rucker ART

CULTURE

Shoe Sensation Steamboat Nights

SATURDAY, OCT. 2

Sunset Concerts

MUSIC

FRIDAY, OCT. 1-2

Big Four Station will be the site for folks to gather and celebrate the fall weather for this “neon-glow” event. The event is family friendly and will feature a silent disco with DJ John Q, a black light experience, balloon glimmer and Maker13 will be o ering make and take crafts. There will be live entertainment at the Jammin’ in Je Stage.

Vary This art show is known worldwide — and it was called the No. 1 Best Fine Art and Design show in America for the last ten years, according to Sunshine Artist Magazine last year. This festival is popular amongst locals as well as those who come to town for it. It can draw upwards of 250,000 visitors. Peruse and purchase unique handicrafts, ne art and jewelry. This is a great area to take in the Victorian architecture ( one of the largest in the nation) along with the art. It should be on any fall festival priority list.

28 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

FINALLY FALL

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 29 STAFF PICKS

SATURDAYS, OCT. 9, 16, 23 & 30 Open Studio Louisville Various locations | louisvillevisualart.org | $12 | Noon-6 p.m. If you’ve been on an Open Studio tour in the past, noticeyou’llabig change this year. It’s not on one weekend but on the majority of Saturdays in October. But the idea is the same — artists in Louisville Metro and Southern Indiana open their normally private studios to the public. It’s the ultimate behindthe-scenes art event. The directory is the guide to studio locations and provides information on all participants (it also serves as the ticket). Louisville Visual Art’s website lists the locations to pick up the directory. There is also an exhibition of work done by artists on the tour at the Cressman Center for Visual Arst from Oct. 15-Nov. 19. —Jo Anne Triplett VISUAL Painter Tom Cannady on a previous Open Studio tour.

‘The Turn Of The Screw’ Kentucky Shakespeare Headquarters | 616 Myrtle St. | kyshakespeare.com | $20 |

FRIDAY, OCT. 8 Birds, Brews, And Bluegrass Louisville Nature Center | 3745 Illinois Ave. | louisvillenaturecenter.org | $5-$10 suggested donation | 7 p.m. Music. Food. Beer. Nature. That’s all you need to sell us for an event, and that’s exactly what the Louisville Nature Center is providing at Birds, Brews, and Bluegrass.

Times vary If you didn’t catch any Shakespeare in the Park performances in the summer, you still have a chance to enjoy the talents of Kentucky Shakespeare. For their annual Halloween-time production, KY Shakes presents a chilling, twoactor version of “The Turn of the Screw.” Described as “part ghost story and part psychological horror,” this adaptation of Henry James’ famous novella is about a young governess “hired by a wealthy reculse to look after his orphaned niece and nephew — two seeingly innocent children who soon reveal terrifying secrets.” This is the rst Kentucky Shakespeare production set in the theater company’s new Old Louisville headquarters. Producing Artistic Director Matt Wallace told LEO back in June that the building would be a tting location for the show — a Victorian ghost tale in a Victorian neighborhood. —Danielle Grady

SUNDAY, OCT. 3 Flavors Of Fall Festival Repurposed | 615 W. Main St. | Search Facebook | Free | 1-5 p.m. Downtown Louisville is about as far from a farm as you can get, but it will transform into a fall wonderland at the Flavors of Fall Festival. At the outdoor Repurposed venue, there will be pumpkin painting, a caramel apple bar, petting zoo, apple cider and pumpkin spice donuts, yard games, a DJ and dancing... and that’s only the free stu . For $5, your kids can go wild in the Bounce Zone and everyone can enjoy bites from the food trucks: Brain Freeze Cones for a Cause and Poor Man’s TexMex BBQ. —LEO WEDNESDAY, OCT. 6-31

SHAKESPEARE

MUSIC

The Song Sparrows will be performing bluegrass music, and there will also be a guided night hike, plus plenty of food and beer. VIP tickets are $25 each and include premium on-site parking, a souvenir mug and a free beer. —Scott Recker

‘Empyrean’ By Madison Cawein WheelHouse Art | 2650 Frankfort Ave. | wheelhouse.art | Free Prepare to see heaven on earth. Empyrean, the ery light of the highest celestial realm, is the theme for this exhibition of Madison Cawein’s photographs. As a spiritual realist, he searches for spiritual truths hidden in worldly reality. “To be an artist is to stand beside the door to the invisible world and be receptive to what comes through,” said Cawein. “In these images, both photographs and related paintings, I see the invisible as the Empyrean embodied symbolically as a chandelier.” This is the rst exhibition for the “under new ownership” WheelHouse Art, formerly the B. Deemer Gallery. Another rst: While Cawein has shown his paintings multiple times at B. Deemer, he hadn’t exhibited photographs there before (they are usually source material for his paintings). Now is the perfect opportunity as part of the 2021 Louisville Photo Biennial. Face masks are required. —Jo Anne Triplett ART ‘Alice Cooper, March 1, 1970’ by Bill Carner. Photograph. ‘Coming Through’ by Madison Cawein. Dye sublimation on aluminum.

THROUGH NOV. 13

30 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 COMING IN OCTOBER PRESENTS PRESENTED BY BOWE INC & REACTION PRESENTS HOBO JOHNSON & THE LOVEMAKERS ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY TOUR OCT 3 OCT 2 BOOMBOX WITH GOODSEX AMIGO THE DEVIL WITH TEJON STREET CORNER THIEVES AND STEPHANIE LAMBRING OCT 6 LUCERO WITH MORGAN WADE OCT 22 OCT 24 SOLD OUT 100 GECS 10,000 GECS TOUR SOLD OUT OCT 1 KR8VN8VS RECORDS PRESENTS THE N8VS VOL 1 ALBUM RELEASE FEATURING THE N8VS, SASHA RENEE, DUCK CITY MUSIC & JK-47 BROOKS RITTER WITH HAWKS AND RUNAWAY SOULS OCT 19 OCT 16 OCT 23 SPAFFORD WITH EGGY MURDER BY DEATH 20TH ANNIVERSARY WITH QUIET HOLLERS BENEFIT FOR GIRLS ROCK LOUISVILLE THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! TICKETS AVAILABLE AT HEADLINERSLOUISVILLE.COM OR AT THE BOX OFFICE 1386 LEXINGTON RD, LOUISVILLE, KY BOY NAMED BANJO OCT 27 OCT 28 SHANNON AND THE CLAMS WITH OHMME STAFF PICKS THROUGH OCT. 31 ‘Closer To The Stage: 50 Years Of Music Photography By Bill Carner’ Surface Noise | 600 Baxter Ave. | facebook.com/surfacenoiserecords | Free Bill Carner loves music and live mances,perforwhich has been well served by his career as a photographer. This retrospective, part of the Louisville Photo Biennial, is perfectly placed in the record shop Surface Noise. The exhibition “is about music made by some of my favorite musicians that I have seen and have been lucky enough to photograph,” said Carner. “Music has enriched my soul and drained my wallet for over 50 years, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. A few of the photographs in the show have been exhibited before, [like] the Velvet Underground, Charles Lloyd, Alice Cooper. Others like John Hammond and Son House have never made it beyond my contact sheets until now.” The closing reception is on Sunday, Oct. 31 from 6-8 p.m. —Jo Anne Triplett PHOTOS

And, according to Barnett, there is a small Easter egg hidden in “War Mage.”

•

“The March Of War Mage” begins appropriately enough, with a slow, almost sinister buildup of banging drums, violins and horns that immediately evokes a forbidding sense that something is definitely on the move and headed this way. There are several movements over the course of the seven minute epic, from chaotic thrashing to symphonic crescendos and peaceful intermission that wind the track down before the inevitable trample back into the war mage’s final leg. A song like this, especially such a roving, exploratory instrumental one, is hard to put into precise, definable terms but, if you wanted, you could call it, according to the band itself, “trash prog.” Matteo Barnett, the band’s electric mandolinist, says “War Mage” was a concentrated effort on the entire band’s part.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 31 PICK-UP LOCATIONS GET YOUR Full list at LEOWEEKLY.COM/DISTRIBUTIONBungalowJoe's• 7813 Beulah Church Rd Street Box @ Republic Bank Bus Stop • 10100 Brookridge Village Blvd Party Center - Fern Creek • 5623 Bardstown Rd Street Box @ Piccadilly Square • 5318 Bardstown Rd Jay "Lucky" Food Mart #1 • 5050 Billtown Rd Cox's - J-Town • 3920 Ruckriegel Pkwy Bearno's Pizza - Taylorsville • 10212 Taylorsville Rd Louisville Athletic Club - J-Town • 9565 Taylorsville Rd Cox's - Patti Ln • 2803 Patti Ln L.A. Fitness • 4620 Taylorsville Rd Habitat ReStore - Taylorsville • 4044 Taylorsville Rd Feeders Supply - Hikes Point • 3079 Breckenridge Ln Street Box @ Heine Bros • 3965 Taylorsville Rd Paul's Fruit Market - Bon Air • 3704 Taylorsville Rd LISTEN NOW PODCASTS FOR EVERYONE Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or find all of our podcasts on the LPM app. MUSIC SONIC FROM‘MARCHISOLATIONBREAKDOWN:TANKENSEMBLEOFTHEWARMAGE’THEIR2020RELEASE By Tyrel Kessinger | leo@leoweekly.com IN THE HEART of the lockdown last year, Isolation Tank Ensemble released “March Of The War Mage,” a song that feels like it now has a place within our post-pandemic world with its sense of approaching uneasiness, its unexpected turns at unexpected corners. For a band that violinist Kirstyn Blandy says doesn’t want to take itself “too seriously,” they’ve certainly created a serious listening anddayendcomemoodupyouofeveryone“LifeBlandythingloud,somethingthingwantedexperience.“Wesome-different,some-rowdy,”says.throwslotscurveballs:canwakeinagreatandtotheofyourconfusedwondering what just happened. ‘War Mage,’ in a lot of ways, was going into uncharted territory, challenging ourselves to stitch musical motifs together into a tangible experience, a musical voyage. For me, it’s a battle song. It takes on sorrow, despair, longing, madness and a ﬁnal triumph of victory as we overcome them. When we go to battle against the War Mage, we are battling ourselves, our perceived shortcomings, a future that perhaps used to seem a lot brighter.”

tionconversa-witheachother,andthisonewascre-atedthatwayalso.Some-timesfolkshaveavisionforthetone and journey of the song, but this one came about practicearoundonemostlywithevery-fuckinginthespace and ﬁnding those twotogether.moments‘ah-ha’Ihadmainriffs from an old, dead song, and one week no one but our guitar plater Andrew could make practice, so he and I sat face to face and made jokes and worked on riffs and built the basic skeleton of the song that came to be what it is now.”

If you know how to read Morse code, that is. “The ﬁrst pass that Matt [Clayton], who plays synth, did for a rough recording had a part in a very quiet lonely spot that I noted sounded like Morse code and I said it made me feel like a survivor’s capsule drifting into deep space, sending out a distress signal that may never be picked up. And then Matt actually wrote a Morse code part for it that we put in the song.”

“I think most of our music comes about as a

By Syd Bishop | leo@leoweekly.com

MUSIC

Link: https://c-h-r.bandcamp.com/album/zldchr

Kicking off with a song about Nascar, Shitfire are the kind of gleefully goofball thrash nerds that can reference Jeff Gordon and the phrase “Raise Hell, Praise Dale” with success. The music here is garage punk rock with a thrash metal soul — short, punchy and to the goddamn point. The folks in Shitfire are my kind of mutants. The band offers up a magical blend of hookheavy tunes that rarely exceed two minutes in length, instead focusing on short, catchy rock jams that would fit in equally with early-Megadeth and Hole at the same time. Listening to this feels like finding out what your weirdo friends have been up to all this time, which is apparently making a kick-ass album.

DISTILLERY BEST LOUISVILLE DISTILLERY VOTED THREE LOCAL REVIEWSRECORD

SHITFIRE FUCK TO THIS

Link: https://shitfıre.bandcamp.com/album/fuck-to-this ()CHR ZLDCHR Many years of my life have been dedicated to the Zelda games, from discovering the wonders of an open world map on the original and the criminally underrated “Link’s Awakening,” to the months I spent over the pandemic exploring in “Breath of the Wild.” Combine that with my insatiable love of all things ‘90s and early-aughts from Warp Records and zldchr by () chr was an absolute must for this list. Playing almost like a DJ mixtape, the artist has combined various scores from various Zelda games and mixed in beats from Autechre and Aphex Twin. As such, there is a veneer of vaporwave to the music, whether that’s in the wash of nostalgia as your brain unpacks the various sample sources, noted, of course, in the album notes. This is a dreamy album that taps into the surreality of both the game and the genres that it mines, and it makes for a good time.

Link: https://theexperience88.bandcamp.com/album/dreamin-pt-2

THE EXPERIENCE DREAMIN’ PT. 2

There is an undeniable overlap between hip-hop and ambient that rarely seems apparent until you stop to think. In both genres, repetition is favored. Likewise, both live and die on the atmosphere that they build, whether that’s through the use of drones or samples and lyrics in telling a story. The Experience delivers on the promise of their name, immersing listeners in a hazy, grimy world that is equal parts atmosphere and beat. The ﬂex here is in rendering this blend of sounds into a logical whole, done here by chopping, screwing and droning. Unlike much hip-hop, the vocals are an equal part of the music, almost rising out of the ether in a fog, before disappearing back into the murk. Still, songs like “Guess Who” are comparably straightforward, less focused on the ambiance of the ﬁrst quarter of the album, instead grinding on an uptempo beat. It’s hard to identify a central emcee (it seems like many heads here) — and that’s meant as a compliment because each and every player is equally intense and committed, whether that’s in their acumen with the mic or willingness to do something different.

LOUISVILLE has three all-vegetarian Indian restaurants, and, to tell you the truth, the question isn’t why there are so many, but why it took them so long to arrive. We have about 15 Indian restaurants now, and I’m happy to pull up to a table at every singleButone.all-vegetarian Indian? That’s new. Shreeji Indian Vegetarian Street Food opened in November 2018. Honest Indian Restaurant opened just about a year later, at the end of 2019. And somewhere in that same brief window of time — “three years ago,” the guy behind the counter told me — Sonals Kitchen Homemade Authentic Indian Vegetarian Restaurant popped up in a former Moby Dick shop on Chamberlain just north of Westport Road. Now, wait, you may be thinking. Isn’t vegetarian food a serious option at every Indian restaurant? Well, yes. Primarily for religious reasons, nearly 81% of Indians limit meat in their diets, and 39% consider themselves full vegetarians, according to a Pew Research Center study published in Nature. In light of those numbers, you might ask: Why aren’t there more vegetarian Indian restaurants.That’sprobably because it hasn’t really been necessary. Virtually every Indian restaurant offers a variety of vegetarian items on its omnivorous menu. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, every Indian restaurant has options for you. But the new arrivals open up a wider choice of vegetarian options, including not only main dishes but the deliciously tempting street-food snacks called chaat. The menu at Sonals Kitchen is typical. Spanning the wall behind the counter and covering eight online menu pages, it includes about 150 items, with nary a speck of meat, chicken or ﬁsh in sight.Thali (sampler) platters representing four of India’s major regions are $13.99-$14.99, but just about everything else is $9.99 or less. No alcohol is served, but there’s a broad choice of Indian beverages based on yogurt, fruit or nuts, plus American soft drinks. We went for a late lunch on a Saturday and found about half of the booths in the small eatery already taken. We ordered from the friendly gent at the counter and took a seat at an orange table in a high-backed pea-green booth.

What’s a thali? It’s a sampler platter that includes small portions of a variety of Indian dishes. Sonals Kitchen o ers a choice of four regional thalis. This one represents North India.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 33

FOOD & DRINK

Chaat, the crunchy, spicy Indian street food favorite, makes a great starter, but it’s a lot like chips and salsa: It’s way easy to ll up before your main course arrives. It’s worth it. | PHOTOS BY ROBIN GARR. SONALS MASTERS INDIAN VEGETARIAN CUISINE

RECOMMENDED

By Robin Garr | LouisvilleHotBytes.com

A base of crunchy, broken-up fried-pastry samosas were slathered with spicy green and sweet-tart brown chutney, a ration of chickpeas, dollops of yogurt, fiery red sauce, mung bean sprouts and chopped tomatoes, all topped with crunchy sev, India’s turmeric-laced answer to chow mein noodles. We ordered two thali samplers — North Indian and Rajastan thali ($13.99 each). They were served on large white-plastic trays designed to hold about a dozen different samples. Many of them were bathed in Indian sauces that impressed with their bright, complex flavors that pop in your mouth and make you go “whoa!”Irecognized several of the items, but other, unfamiliar bits sent me to Google and The Times of India’s recipes web pages for more information.Amongmany delights was a tiny baingan (eggplant) stewed into an aromatic brown sauce until its chewy skin contrasted with a melting, soft interior. Chana masala is made of chickpeas, long-simmered in a spicy, tangy sauce. A couple of veggie pakoras were wrapped in fried pastry; potato slices sported a fried coating; paneer cheese bathed in a creamy tikka masala sauce; an idli rice cake was perched in a creamy and citrusy bright-yellow sauce. Yogurt raita helped with the heat, and green-lentil dal and turmericyellow basmati rice completed the tray. Rajastan thali ($13.99), from the northwest Indian region near Pakistan that incorporates the Great Indian Desert, brought even more treats. I recognized several familiar curries: spicy potato and cauliflower aloo ghobi, tasty peas and farmer cheese matar paneer and spinach and cheese palak paneer all satisfied me with attentiongetting four-pepper heat. A sphere of firm baati churma baked bread came with instructions to tear off pieces and dip them in lentil dal.

This tray was completed with three small idlis in tangy yellow sauce, plus another idli dressed in chutneys with yogurt and a couple of dessert items: cake-like Mysore pak and traditional gulab jamun, a sweet pastry ball with sticky-sweet sauce for dipping.

The thalis came with breads: a not-quite-crisp lentil-ﬂour papad and a wheat-ﬂour roti that had been heated and generously spread with ghee. A couple of salty lassi yogurt drinks ($5.99 each) did the job of cooling spicy heat, but were disappointingly thin and watery.

• SONALS KITCHEN 3741 Pamela Rae Drive sonalskitchenky.square.site407-136

Chaat — the crunchy, spicy Indian street food favorite — makes a great starter, but it’s a lot like chips and salsa: It’s entirely too easy to ﬁll up on before the main course arrives.

This spicy thali platter o ers tastes from Northwestern India’s Rajasthani region, near Pakistan.

34 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 FOOD & DRINK

Along with the dessert items on the thalis, we received a complimentary plate of jalebi, a circle of toothache-sweet, reddish-orange deep-fried sugar tubes spun in a circle like India’s answer to funnel cake. A large meal for two was $46.95, plus a $12.44 tip.

Samosa chaat ($6.99) was a good pick, offering the startling mix of sweet, sour and fiery flavors, as well as soft, soupy, chewy and crunchy flavors that make chaat, in Indian tradition, “an explosion in your mouth.”

REED DEVELOPS CREATIVE WRITING

By Melissa Gaddie | leo@leoweekly.com

JASEMINE

That’s what I want from, that’s what Louisville can do for me — they can treat me just like they treat those people who they’re letting come in here and do work, as though we know what we’re talking about... that we know what we need..., treat me like I know what we need. And that’s that’s all I could ask for.

• Courtesy of Jasemine Reed.

And a lot of this stuff that they think is what’s best for us is coming from people who don’t live here. And, I live here and I work here, and I look like the people that live here and work here, too. I want them to treat me like they’re treating these people who are coming in here and creating their own work, what they feel like is best for us.

JASEMINE “JAZZY J” REED believes that writing saved her life, and now she wants to help others use writing to save their lives as well. In 2013, Reed founded Reedmywords, a business dedicated to writing and helping others with grant writing, resume development, tutoring and more. Reed worked in social services right after graduating from EKU with a degree in psychology, and grew to become a spoken word artist, published poet and playwright. She has now expanded on her Reedmywords concept to open Creative Writing and Things, a community space in the Shawnee Learning Center on Lindell Avenue. LEO spoke with Jasemine about her journey as a writer and what she wants to accomplish with Reedmywords and Creative Writing and Things. LEO: So Creative Writing and Things is just one facet of what you do, and it’s, that’s your baby that you’re trying to develop and build up. Tell me more about that. Jasemine Reed: I wanted to use my passion, skill for writing to help the social and emotional learning of young people, for me, mainly because it started with me, and how writing allowed me, as a young teenager, to be able to express the strong emotions and feelings that I would have. And so I had to learn how to navigate those emotions and how to express my emotions about the things that I was going through as a young person. It literally saved my life. So I, being a person who writing has positively affected, wanted to share that with other people. The opportunity was presented to me to bring my programs to West Louisville on Lindell Avenue, and I jumped. I opened up Creative Writing and Things on August the 15th, and it’s been the one of the best decisions I ever made. Are you currently interacting with or working with people from just the neighborhood surrounding you? Are you getting people from, I know Louisville is a very segregated city, and I know most white people tend to behave like there’s really nothing west of Ninth Street. It’s ridiculous. But, you know, talk to me about the kind of people who are accessing your services.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 35 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

PROGRAMS IN THE SHAWNEE AREA

Sure, well, so far since we’ve opened, we’ve had, I mean, majority of our demographics that have come in here signed up classes are

gesthaswithfemaledominantlypre-Blackwomen,children,thatbeenmybig-demographic, I mean, the most, the characteristics that I’ve seen often are, these are middleaged women to elder women up in the 60s and 70s, grandmas that are taking care of their grandkids, or helping parents take care of their grandkids, and it’s like ‘Ooh, my grandson and beendemographicscangranddaughter,mytheyusethis.’Somyhavepredominantly Black. I assume that that’s what majority of my clientele will be although they are not my only demographics that I do serve, I offer my services to any and everybody. Um, but as of now, there seems to be the demographic that I’ve been serving the most of, for sure. What kind of goals would you like to achieve? Or what do you want the program to do over the next several years? Well, my ultimate goal is to start a nonprofit for gifted and talented Black kids. I want Reedmywords to get that started. That’s what I see in the next few years, I see me coming out of this space, I’m going to be here, as long as I’m supposed to be here, but I see me, I see me opening up the old, I think it’s the old Actors Theatre building. I want to start a nonprofit for gifted and talented Black kids who want to get into theater, who want to get into performance. It doesn’t have to necessarily be spoken word if you want to be a songwriter. Because we have a lot of gifted kids — they just are not, they don’t have opportunities to be groomed. And I want to make it free, you know, and I know that through nonprofit, there’s a lot of sectors and avenues for programming for young people. And I just want to do what was done for me.

What can the community do to help you to further these goals, further Creative Writing and Things and Reedmywords and all that? How could the community best help you? I got a very radical answer for you, but I’m gonna say it. What Louisville can do for me is to treat me as a person who lives in West Louisville, who’s raising children in West Louisville, working in West Louisville, to treat me and what we do as though we know what the needs are of this community. Because there’s a lot of things happening in West Louisville right now, there’s a lot of development being made, there’s a lot of stuff popping up. And a lot of this stuff is being ran by people who do not live here.

36 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

Looking for a buddy who’s brainy, brawny and a bit of a dork? You’ve come to the right place! Introducing the one and only Churro! Churro is a one-year-old Boxer/Labrador Retriever mix who weighs in at 58 pounds and has a smile for all he meets. This rowdy, playful guy came to the Kentucky Humane Society when Louisiana communities were ravaged by Hurricane Ida. Churro was in an overcrowded Louisiana shelter before Hurricane Ida hit and the Kentucky Humane Society transferred him, along with over 60 other pets, to KHS for a second chance at finding their forever home. In this way, KHS is helping Louisiana shelters make room for more owner-surrendered animals as well as lost pets so they can be reunited with their families! Upon arriving, Churro quickly made friends with all of the staff and volunteers. He loves to play and an active home with lots of toys would be Churro’s dream! This sweet doofus has proven too fixated on feline friends, so a home without cats or small animals is a must! Churro has done great with other dogs while at KHS and adjusts his play style to fit almost any companion. He does, however, pull and bark like a seal when he sees dogs on walks. He just wants to play so badly! Churro is working on learning some basic manners and would love a family who can continue teaching him how to be a true Kentucky gentleman. Are you up for a life filled with adventure, love and friendship? If so, come meet Churro today! Churro is neutered, micro-chipped and up-to-date on all vaccinations. Visit Churro today at the Kentucky Humane Society’s East Campus, 1000 Lyndon Lane, or learn more at www.kyhumane.org/dogs.

CHURRO

‘Primordial’ #1 Story by Je Lemire Art by Andrea Sorrentino Review by Krystal Moore The Great Escape The dream team of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino have gotten together again. Their “Gideon Falls” book was outstanding, so seeing they are working on a new collaboration is pretty exciting. So far, they don’t disappoint. “Primordial” starts out in 1959 when the U.S. space program sent two monkeys, Able and Baker, into orbit to see if humans could withstand ﬂight of that nature. It seemed they couldn’t, since the monkeys died. Or did they? Flash forward to 1961 and Dr. Donald Pembrook, a young black man with a PhD in electrical engineering, has been summoned to Cape Canaveral. He’s hoping he’s been called to start the space program up again. Sadly though, he’s merely been sent in to sort what is junk and what can be salvaged for use in the military. His disgust soon turns to wonder when he ﬁnds the readouts on the monkeys that show that rumors of their death were greatly exaggerated. What does it all mean? This is a super interesting beginning to a story that will open up a lot of questions about the early space race between Russia and the United States. Jeff Lemire is a great storyteller and Andrea Sorrentino is the perfect artist to bring Lemire’s thoughts into pictures we can all relate to.

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD COMIC BOOK REVIEWS!

STACEY Looking for a cat who’s equal parts beauty, brains and chonkness? Look no further than THUNDER! Thunder is a six-year-old mighty Shorthair mix who somehow manages to resemble an owl, a Tarsier and an actively rolling snow ball all at once. This almost 18 pound beauty found herself at the Kentucky Humane Society when she was transferred from an overcrowded shelter that didn’t have room for such a large and poised creature like herself. Now she’s ready to find a family of her very own who will worship her as the goddess she is! Thunder is full of cuddles, affection and blank stares that will have you questioning all of your life decisions. If you’re looking for a cat who will make you laugh until the end of time, you’ve come to the right place! Thunder is spayed, micro-chipped, up-to-date on vaccinations and ready to judge you. Meet Thunder at the East Campus, 1000 Lyndon Lane, or learn more at kyhumane.org/cats.

‘The Dancing Plague’ (OGN) Art and Story by Gareth Brooks Review by Felix Whetsel The Great Escape Sometimes you read a comic and recognize it for pushing boundaries and setting its own definition for comics. ‘The Dancing Plague’ is one such comic, a timely mixed media story filled with dry humor. The backdrop of the story is 16th century Strasbourg, exploring the real life events that unfolded as the city was ravaged by a bizarre dancing plague. Hundreds of villagers danced hysterically for days on end, some of them nearly dying. However the protagonist of the story is a woman named Mary, a devoutly religious mother married to an abusive drunkard. We see through flashbacks that she has a history of bizarre visions that led to her ostracization from her family and community. Meanwhile, in the present day, her story is woven with that of the dancing fever, as she is the only one able to see the demonic creatures that terrorize her neighbors.

While the story itself is an interesting tale of life and disease in medieval France, what else stands out about this book is the wonderfully eclectic art. Brooks employed a few mixed-media methods, with some of the panels simply being textured and hand-drawn, while others include hand embroidery. There will be several pages of hand-drawn panels, and then you turn a page and the baby blue or red threads that he uses for the religious and demonic imagery practically jump off the page. The effect it has really complements the era of the story, like a 21st century Bayeux Tapestry.

By Krystal Moore and Felix Whetsel | leo@leoweekly.com

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 37 ETC. THINK TWICE The New York Times Magazine Crossword BY STEPHEN MCCARTHY / EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ No. 0905 ACROSS 1 What a drawbridge may bridge 5 In that case 9 Control-tower installation 14 Pass 19 ‘‘ That one’s ____’’ (‘‘My bad’’) 20 Amelia Bedelia, e.g. 21 ‘‘ Go me!’’ 22 Member of a noble family 23 2004 film about a group of MALIGNERS 25 It might be put on for stage PAGEANTRIES 27 Annual film festival where ‘‘Saw’’ and ‘‘Get Out’’ premiered 28 ‘‘ ____ La La’’ (1964 hit) 29 Senator, e.g., for short 30 Avoids a bogey, perhaps 31 Being 33 Be hopping mad 34 Cool one 37 W.W. II hero, informally 39 Muletas are waved at them 40 Canon camera 41 Branch of Islam 42 You might be MARVELING AT this as it whizzes by 46 Sort of SCHEMATIC for Christian education 48 Like some casts 49 City nicknamed the Old Pueblo 51 French city near the Belgian border 52 Prefix with colonial 53 Tightfitting 55 Toni Morrison title heroine 56 Annual British acting award 58 Series of questions, maybe 60 Counterpart of elles 62 Opposite of never 64 Many relationships are INSTIGATED on one 68 Healthy eaters may give this A WIDE BERTH 72 Disrupt an online meeting, in a way 74 Mauna ____ 75 Grp. that hasn’t yet found what it’s looking for 76 Wonder Woman and others 79 Valuable load for a mule 81 Influence 84 Pioneering gangsta rap group 85 Burdened 86 Just 88 Preferring one’s own company, perhaps 90 They can be NOISELESS while stalking prey 93 Explorers of the UNTRAVERSED 95 Burden 96 Old cable-TV inits. 97 Fill in 98 Word repeated in ‘‘I ____, I ____, it’s off to work I go’’ 99 Lick, say 100 ‘‘____ merci!’’ (French cry) 101 ‘‘On it, captain!’’ 103 ‘‘No need to make me a plate’’ 106 Five-letter word that replaces a four-letter word? 107 1980s gaming inits. 108 Not even 111 Writing done GRAPHICALLY 115 The Trojans lacked the FORESIGHT to turn this down 116 It’s multilayered 117 You should always bring it to a competition 118 Children’s author Blyton 119 Be taken aback 120 One way to cook a 116-Across 121 Unenthusiastic 122 They know the drill: Abbr. 123 Word after hard or before short DOWN 1 ‘‘My Two ____’’ (2015 Claudia Harrington children’s book) 2 Top 3 Appliance brand since 1934 4 Pea shooters? 5 ‘‘Sign me up!’’ 6 Complete travesty 7 Feature of many British accents 8 Binges too much, for short 9 As if orchestrated 10 Indexed data structures 11 Directly 12 Fourth person to walk on the moon 13 Do a double take? 14 Boot 15 Almost 16 What makes Shrek shriek? 17 One side in a debate 18 It may be blown 24 They may be blown 26 House Republican V.I.P. Stefanik 28 Star in Canis Major 32 Just so 34 Hot-dog topper 35 Airline passenger request 36 Lion ____ 38 ‘‘Dear ____ Hansen’’ (2017 Tony-winning musical) 41 Responds to br-r-r-isk weather? 42 Like zebras and lions 43 Voice with an Echo 44 Rub it in 45 ‘‘It is what it is’’ and others 46 Mike Krzyzewski, to Duke basketball fans 47 Rise 50 Hot-dog topper 54 A little too silky, maybe 56 Justin Trudeau, by birth 57 Don’t believe it! 59 Aftmost masts on ships 61 Gives fuel to 63 Gets a move on, quaintly 65 Who can hear you scream in space 66 Ending with poly67 Title meaning ‘‘commander’’ 69 ‘‘____ Meenie’’ (2010 hit) 70 Battling 71 Rings up 73 Showing the effects of an all-nighter, say 76 Give one’s blessing to 77 It has more coastline than California, surprisingly 78 Score after seven points, maybe 80 Certain radio format 82 Apropos of 83 ‘‘Like that’ll ever happen!’’ 86 ‘‘Appetizers’’ or ‘‘Desserts,’’ at a diner 87 International cosmetics company ____ Rocher 89 Content people? 91 Larsson who wrote ‘‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’’ 92 Pooh-pooh 94 Common April activity, nowadays 97 Vietnamese sandwich 100 Group trying to sack a QB 102 Make over, as a ship 104 A crowd, they say 105 It has 104-Down legs 106 Obscure, with ‘‘out’’ 109 They may be set by industry grps. 110 Girl in ‘‘The Old Curiosity Shop’’ 111 sin/tan 112 Major Japanese carrier 113 ‘‘Kill Bill’’ co-star 114 You can chew on it 115 Some appliances MOATIFSORADARENACT ONMEMAIDIRULEXENON MEANGIRLSGREASEPAINT SUNDANCESHANHLER PARSENTITYBOILCAT IKETOROSEOSSHIA MAGLEVTRAINCATECHISM ALLSTARTUCSONLILLE NEOSNUGSULAOLIVIER EXAMILSEACHTIME DATINGSITEWHITEBREAD ZOOMBOMBKEASETI AMAZONSKILOSWAYNWA LADENMERELYASOCIAL LIONESSESADVENTURERS ONUSTNNBRIEFOWE WETDIEUAYESIRIATE BLEEPNESLESSTHAN CALLIGRAPHYGIFTHORSE ONIONAGAMEENIDREEL SAUTETEPIDSGTSSELL 1234 5678 910 11 1213 1415161718 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 343536 37 38 39 40 41 424344 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 5657 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 6566 67 68 697071 72 73 74 75 767778 79 80 81 8283 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 9192 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102103104105 106 107 108109 110 111112113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

“If this woman came to me for individual therapy, I would be compelled to point out to her that her boyfriend is physically and emotionally abusing her,” said therapist Marissa Myers, LCP. “Getting ‘uncomfortably angry’ and ‘throwing a fit of epic proportions’ are examples of manipulative behaviors abusers use to make sure their victims know who’s in charge. The disregard this man has for her physical health and safety raises the bar to physical abuse in my Myersopinion.”frequently works with individuals and couples to help them resolve conflicts around sex and intimacy, URINE, but she would not work with you—alone or as a couple—with the goal of saving this“Workingrelationship.with this reader on how to compromise or communicate better regarding this issue would amount to facilitating “Mysaidcontinuationtheofanabusiverelationship,”Myers.advicetoher is to begin gathering resources, telling safe people, and planning a safe exit. Once she’s safely out of the relationship, therapy can help her avoid getting into another abusive Whichrelationship.”isnotto say this is your fault, URINE. Your boyfriend manipulated you with his anger and leveraged your own desire to be a good partner against you. And while it’s fine to fantasize about watching your partner pee every time she pees, it’s unrealistic and unfair and unworkable to demand that your partner allow you to watch them every single time they take a piss. There’s nothing LOL about any of this, URINE, and I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear. Yours is one of those

FIGURATIVELY PISSED Q: I’m worried this may be above your pay grade. LOL. My boyfriend and I have been together for nearly five years. When we first got together, he shared a fetish with me, which has honestly gotten out of hand. I’m not close-minded and I genuinely love pleasing people, and my approach to sex has always been, “Whatever turns you on, turns me on!” But his fetish has crossed the line from kink to obsession. Not to mention the onus of his “fetish” falls entirely on me. So, the big reveal: my boyfriend is a urophiliac. But not just your garden variety one. If he doesn’t get to watch me pee every single time he gets angry. The first two years of our relationship were terrifying because if I peed while he was at work, he would throw a fit of epic proportions. So, I would hold it in. This caused UTIs and other problems. But he still insists that I must hold it in for as long as possible so I can give him “a strong stream” every time. I also have to let him watch me poop, which is embarrassing as hell, because I pee when I poop. If I need to pee in the middle of the night, I have to wake him up—which makes him mad—so instead of waking him up I hold it in all night. It has gotten to the point where his obsession has become mine. But it’s not sexy for me. After I had our child, I literally wasn’t allowed to have thirty seconds alone in the bathroom after shoving a human out of my vagina in full view of ten adults I did not know. Even then—in the hospital—he had to watch me pee. I can’t use the bathroom in public unless I videotape it for him. I’m in hell. I haven’t had a private piss nobody has watched or made me feel guilty about for FIVE YEARS. I feel like my humanity is being leached away. I’ve said all these things to him, and He. Does. Not. Care. This has taken over my entire life. Sorry if it’s weird. I’ve read your columns for years and you’re the only person I can ask about this. LOL. I don’t want to break up my family over this. Help me! Unrelenting Requirements Inducing Nervous Exhaustion A: You don’t wanna break up your family over this, URINE, but I sure do. To be perfectly frank, I’d like to break up your boyfriend’s skull over this—figuratively speaking. I’m not advocating violence. It’s just that… after reading your letter… I wanna figuratively slap your boyfriend upside the head so hard his figurative skull breaks into a thousand figurative pieces. And while I don’t think your question is above my pay grade—what you need to do seems obvious to me and will, no doubt, be obvious to everyone who reads your letter—I nevertheless called in a couple of Dr.experts.IanFields is a urogynecologist who specializes in pelvic floor disorders and bladder conditions. I shared your letter with him to get his expert opinion on the risks you’re taking with your physical health, URINE, but before Dr. Fields would address the health risks you’ve being bullied into running, he wanted to address the elephant in the “Let’sroom.deliveryandroombed-androombath-thethecall this behavior what it is: abuse,” said Dr. Fields. “This woman needs to get out of this controlling and abusive relationship.” I am in complete agreement with Dr. Fields, URINE: you’re not indulging a kinky boyfriend, you’re being terrorized (your own words) by an abusive boyfriend. Leave “Inhim.terms of health risks, there are many,” Dr. Fields continued. “Keeping large amounts of urine in your bladder is a set up for recurrent urinary tract infections. These infections can track upwards to the kidneys in some cases and cause an infection in the kidney called pyelonephritis. Recurrent bouts of pyelonephritis can lead to permanent kidney damage. And you don’t want to lose leadinamounts“KeepingURINE.you’reonlykidneysDestroyingittheykidneys—onceyourlosefunction,doesn’treturn.”yourisn’tthehealthriskrunning,largeofurinethebladdercantoabladder stretch injury and may lead to long-standing urinary retention—or the inability to empty the bladder— which may or may not recover over time,” said Dr. Fields. “The bladder is a repeatedinsultsfromheartyprettymuscleandcanrecovermanybutdamaged like this could do irreparable harm. In addition, these insults could lead to overactive bladder and with time, to urgency urinary incontinence, that is, leakage that you cannot control when you get the urge to go to the bathroom.” So, URINE, the health risks you’re running to avoid your boyfriend’s anger cannot be described as insignificant. Now let’s talk about the emotional and frienddamagepsychologicalyourboy-hasalready inflicted on you.

38 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 SAVAGE LOVE By Dan Savage | mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavageROBINSONRACHELBYPHOTO

ETC.

‘The bladder is a pretty hearty muscle and can recover from many insults but repeated damaged like this could doharm.‘irreparable

Owner: Carol Ellis Birch, Angela Birch Coleman, 6093 Cain Forest Dr., Walkertown, NC 27051. Lien Holder: PNC Bank NA, PO Box 313, Wilmington, OH 45177. Unless owner or lienholder objects in written form within 14 days after the last publication of this notice.

2. SAID ABDULLAHI 2011 SILVER MAZDA M6 1YVHZ8CH3B5M26760

Katherine Beesley Patricia Hendricks Unknown Heirs or Bene ciaries Unknown Owner(s) or Creditor(s) Year: 1979 Make: Model:UnknownUnknownVIN:0IL15257

Cellco Partnership and its controlled a liates doing business as Verizon Wireless (Verizon Wireless) proposes to build a 35-foot pole Communications Tower at the approx. vicinity of 3212 Southern Avenue, Louisville, Je erson County, KY 40211. Public comments regarding potential e ects from this site on historic properties may be submitted within 30 days from the date of this publication to: Trileaf Corp, [Edward Reynolds, e.reynolds@trileaf.com], [1515 Des Peres Road, Suite 200, St. Louis, MO 63131, 314-997-6111].

Derby City Tires located at 2606 Dixie Hwy intends to sell abandoned cars on or before 10/5/21 if not picked up by owner. Call 290-4442 or come by.

LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 39 ETC. LEGAL CLASSIFIED LISTINGS

Owner: Toledo Lane, 6514 Goforth St, Houston, TX 77021. Lien Holder: GMAC, PoBox 8104 Cockeyesville, MD 21030-8104. Unless the owner or lienholder objects in writing within 14 days after the last publication of this notice.

Don't sit there bored and alone just GRAB THAT THING and join www.X2C2K.com for Phone & cam play. FREE samples fun play so join now at www.x2c2k.com.

NOTICE - LIONEL JOE JARVIS STATE OF MICHIGAN 37th JUDICIAL CIRCUIT COURT ORDER FOR SERVICE BY PUBLICATION/POSTING AND NOTICE OF ACTION CASE NO. 21-0126-DO Court address: 161 East Michigan Avenue, Battle Creek, Michigan 49014 Court telephone no: (269) 969-6518 Plainti : Ruthann Kay Jarvis, 75 Wallace Avenue, Apt. E., Battle Creek, MI 49014. Plainti ’s attorney: Cindy L. Thomas (P62502) 395 South Shore Drive, Suite 204, Battle Creek, Michigan 49014 (296) 964-5080

Owner: Shanoah Rohr, 1379 White Oak Rd, Jackson, KY 41339. Lien Holder: None. Unless the owner or lienholder objects in writing within 14 days after the last publication of this notice.

CHAT

Defendant: Lionel Joe Jarvis, 1850 Date Street, Louisville KY 40210 TO: Lionel Joe Jarvis

Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 2002 Mazda Miata, white in color, VIN#JM1NB353320222023.

Pursuant to KRS 376.480, the following abandoned mobile home located at 4 North Calumet Court, at Southland Mobile Home Community, Louisville, Kentucky shall be sold by Southland via sealed bid on Friday, October 15, 2021 at 10:30 AM to recover rent, storage and legal fees incurred by the owners of said mobile home. The sealed bids will be accepted at 401 Outer Loop, Louisville, KY 40214. Title to the mobile home is not warranted, subject to prior liens and all sales are nal. Seller reserves the right to bid. Terms of sale cash only.

Followmail@savagelove.netDanonTwitter @

Located at 4 North Calumet Court, at Southland Mobile Home Community

502 Towing & Recovery, 3301 7th Street road, Louisville, KY 40216 (502)-777-7652, has intention to obtain title of a 2005 FORD FIVEHUNDRED VIN:1FAFP23105G133075, and will be dispose of in accordance with local and state statute On OCT 6 2021. Unless owner or lienholder: Owner JAMES STAHL OR DANNY STAHL. Lien Holder:NONE. objects in written form within 14 days after this notice.

4. ZACHARY FEENEY 2009 SILVER CHEVY TRAVERSE 1GNEV23D39S101544

Owner: Mitchell Paytes, 286 Park Meadow Dr., Batatvia, OH 45103. Lien Holder: Santander Consumer USA, PO Box 961288, Ft. Worth, TX 76161. Unless owner or lienholder objects in written form within 14 days after the last publication of this notice.

3. SANDRA HOPKINS 2000 WHITE LEXUS RX300 JT6GF10UXY0067603

Pursuant to KRS 376.480, the following abandoned mobile home located at 67 Calumet Drive, at Southland Mobile Home Community, Louisville, Kentucky shall be sold by Southland via sealed bid on Friday, October 15, 2021 at 10:15 AM to recover rent, storage and legal fees incurred by the owners of said mobile home. The sealed bids will be accepted at 401 Outer Loop, Louisville, KY 40214. Title to the mobile home is not warranted, subject to prior liens and all sales are nal. Seller reserves the right to bid. Terms of sale cash only. David E. Wood Unknown Heirs or Bene ciaries Unknown Owner(s) or Creditor(s) Year: 1986 Make: Crestline Homes Model: Unknown VIN: ZC112489 Located at 67 Calumet Drive, at Southland Mobile Home Community Public Notice

502 Towing & Recovery, 3301 7th Street road, Louisville, KY 40216 (502)-777-7652, has intention to obtain title of a 1986 JAGU XJ6 VIN: SAJAV1340GC437422, and will be dispose of in accordance with local and state statute On OCT 6 2021. Unless owner or lienholder: Owner Lauren MUIR. Lien Holder: NONE. objects in written form within 14 days after this notice.

Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 2008 Dodge Charger, white in color. VIN 2B3KA43GX8H247573.

Q: I’m a happily married (mostly) lesbian woman. I am somewhat attracted to men, but only in the context of a threesome with my wife. While I don’t have any desire to sleep with men on my own, I do like giving handjobs to men along with the occasional blowjob. My wife knows about this and is fine with it. We can’t really do much by way of threesomes right now for various reasons, so I’m considering finding a guy (if this pandemic ever ends) to indulge me. My wife is a former sex worker and it bothers her that I do this for men—jerk them off, blow them—without any form of reciprocity. She said it’s a service that I shouldn’t be giving away for nothing. I see her point, but I’m not interested in money. An exchange of services sounds interesting though! Like, I will jerk you off if you clean my bathroom or mow my lawn. I have two questions. First, what do you think about my wife’s view on the subject? Second, what’s the best way to find/approach someone who would be into an arrangement like this?

Owner: Margie Jeanette Cole, 35 W. 1st. St., New Albany, IN 47150. Lien Holder: None. Unless owner or lienholder objects in written form within 14 days a]er the last publication of this notice. Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 2016 Nissan Versa, gray in color.

Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 2005 Nissan Sentra, Gray in color, VIN#3N1CB51D55L459964, Owner: Jolene Nicole Dodson, 122 Scoth Ct. #4, Bardstown, KY 40004 Lien Holder: None. Unless owner or lienholder objects in written form within 14 days after the last publication of this notice.

Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 1995 Chevrolet Baretta, red in color VIN 1G1LV1545SY290099.

Owner: Autumn Terry, 10318 Greentree Lane #4, Louisville, KY 40272. Lien Holder: None. Unless owner or lienholder objects in written form within 14 days after the last publication of this notice.

Public Notice

American Transmission at 6313 A Preston Hwy Louisville Ky 40219 502-968-4805 has intentions to obtain a title to 2007 Lexus ES 350 Vin # JTHBJ46G472018581 unless the owner or lienholder objects in writing within (14) Days after the last publication of legal notice. Gregory A Stokes (Owner) and Credit Acceptance #9445705 (Lienholder)

502 Towing & Recovery, 3301 7th Street road, Louisville, KY 40216 (502)-777-7652, has intention to obtain title of a 2010 TOYOTA CAMRY VIN:4T1BF3EK5AU544454, and will be dispose of in accordance with local and state statute On OCT 6 2021. Unless owner or lienholder: Owner Lauren MUIR. Lien Holder: KY TELCO. objects in written form within 14 days after this notice.

Pursuant to KRS 376.480, the following abandoned mobile home located at 103 Calumet Drive, at Southland Mobile Home Community, Louisville, Kentucky shall be sold by Southland via sealed bid on Friday, October 15, 2021 at 10:00 AM to recover rent, storage and legal fees incurred by the owners of said mobile home. The sealed bids will be accepted at 401 Outer Loop, Louisville, KY 40214. Title to the mobile home is not warranted, subject to prior liens and all sales are nal. Seller reserves the right to bid. Terms of sale cash only. Robert K. Walton, II Brandi N. Cook Unknown Heirs or Bene ciaries Unknown Owner(s) or Creditor(s) Year: 1987 Make: Holly Park Model: Forest Glen VIN: 01FPC17218 Located at 103 Calumet Drive, at Southland Mobile Home Community Public Notice

The System Called Reciprocity A: Your wife doesn’t enjoy giving men blowjobs or handjobs, TSCR, so she gets nothing out of blowing or handing some guy. That’s why her male clients had to pay her for her services. You, on the other hand, enjoy giving blowjobs and handjobs, TSCR, and that enjoyment is what you get out of them. Your wife sounds like one of those straight guys who doesn’t understand why his gay best friend loves giving head even if the guy he’s blowing doesn’t return the favor and/or clean the shower. As to ﬁnding someone who might be interested in being blown or jacked off by a lesbian in exchange for some light housework/yardwork, TSCR, there’s this thing called the Internet. Maybe you heard Katie Couric talking about it on the Today show in 1994? Well, I think the Internet is going to catch on and there are these things on the Internet called “hookup apps” where you can post explicit personal ads. But be careful: if you post a personal ad that reads, “Married lesbian seeks houseboy, will milk for chores,” your phone will “blow up.” I think that’s meant ﬁguratively, TSCR, but the Internet is so new I can’t promise your phone won’t literally blow up. FakeDanSavage! Check out my new website at www.savage.love!

502 Towing & Recovery, 3301 7th Street road, Louisville, KY 40216 (502)-777-7652, has intention to obtain title of a 2007 Ford Expedition VIN: 1FMFK18577LA59836, and will be dispose of in accordance with local and state statute On OCT 6 2021. Unless owner or lienholder: Owner Christopher Gwyn. Lien Holder: Kentuckiana Finance. objects in written form within 14 days after this notice.

letters that makes me wish I had a time machine so I could take you back to the start of this relationship—ﬁve years and one kid ago, back when your boyfriend ﬁrst began terrorizing you—and implore you to leave him before things escalated to this point. And while I’m sure you love your kid and don’t regret having that baby, URINE, you can’t let your desire to keep your child’s home intact prevent you from escaping the hell your boyfriend has made of your life. Take Myers’ advice: Make a plan, lean on supportive friends, take your kid, and get away from this man before your kidneys explode.

Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 2007 Toyota Prius, gray in color. VIN JTDKB20U073210883.

Owner: Jared Wade Phelps, 127 Sunset Ave., Clarksville, IN 47129-2962. Lien Holder: None. Unless the owner or lienholder objects in writing within 14 days after the last publication of this notice.

IT IS ORDERED: You are being sued in this court by the plainti in a Complaint for Divorce. You must le your answer or take other action permitted by law in this court at the court address above on or before, 28 days from the rst publication. If you fail to do so, a default judgment may be entered against you for the relief demanded in the complaint led in this case.

Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 2003 Ford Windstar, red in color, VIN#2FMDA58423BA60900.

502 Towing & Recovery, 3301 7th Street road, Louisville, KY 40216 (502)-777-7652, has intention to obtain title of a 2008 MAZDA 3 VIN: JM1BK343081817533, and will be dispose of in accordance with local and state statute On OCT 6 2021. Unless owner or lienholder: Owner GASHI FETI. Lien Holder: CRAFT WILLIAM GARRY. objects in written form within 14 days after this notice.

Leo’s Towing & Recovery, 510 E Broadway, Louisville, KY 40202 (502)-727-9503, has intention to obtain title to a 2017 Chevrolet Cruze, black in color VIN#1G1BC5SM7H7270996.

502 Towing & Recovery, 3301 7th Street road, Louisville, KY 40216 (502)-777-7652, has intention to obtain title of a 2011 DODGE DURANGO VIN: 1D4SE5GT7BC613941, and will be dispose of in accordance with local and state statute On OCT 6 2021. Unless owner or lienholder: Owner TRAVIS SMITH. Lien Holder: AMERICAN CREDIT ACCE. objects in written form within 14 days after this notice.

1. EPEMBEW PEMBEW 2012 BLACK DODGE JOURNEY 3C4PDCAB7CT256857

40 LEOWEEKLY.COM // SEPTEMBER 29, 2021