Louisville officers were heroes in shooting, but department still has 'troubling' problems

If you watched the video of police responding to the Old National Bank shooting last Monday, you saw two cops performing heroically.

They pulled up on the scene where a gunman had already fatally shot five people and they were immediately under fire.

Unlike what we saw at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, they didn’t wait. They didn’t hide until they had backup. They grabbed their guns and moved in to stop the killer.

They couldn't even see where the shots were coming from, but they went anyway.

Rookie officer Nickolas Wilt, who was working only his fourth shift since being sworn in as a police officer just 10 days earlier, was shot in the head.

If Wilt was scared, you couldn't tell from his body cam.

His training officer, Cory Galloway, after he was grazed by a bullet, scrambled to safety, then bobbed behind a large planter, looking for an angle to take out the shooter. When he finally got one, Galloway killed him.

Sometimes in life, things aren’t simple. They aren’t neatly packaged. Sometimes there is a dissonance in life that we all struggle to understand.

Just a few weeks ago, we received the report from the U.S. Department of Justice that said the Louisville Metro Police Department was rife with problems. Members of the department violated people’s civil rights. There was a culture there that didn’t punish officers who broke rules. Some officers used racist terms when speaking of Black people.

The report was devastating.

What Wilt and Galloway did on April 10 doesn’t change any of that.

What it does show is that our world can be contradictory.

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It shows that while some police officers are not necessarily good people, some of them are good people, and some can perform at a high level, risking their lives when duty calls.

And what it shows is this is not a black-and-white world as some would have you believe.

On social media over the past couple of days, I’ve seen people criticizing interim Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel and Deputy Chief Paul Humphrey for trying to “change the narrative” and criticizing the media for glorifying the officers involved.

Some of the rhetoric was, in fact, way over the top. Humphrey called the officers "superhuman." They weren't that.

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I saw one post where a lawyer praised the police officers for doing a good job, but made it a point to note that they weren’t heroes because they were simply doing their job. When I went back to look for the post Wednesday morning it was gone.

There is nothing wrong with thinking the police responded to a call for help and performed heroically and saved lives. I'm not sure how you can watch the video and come to a different conclusion.

And there’s nothing wrong with thinking there are deep and troubling problems within the Louisville Metro Police Department, which has abused its citizens and targeted African Americans with over-the-top enforcement in Black neighborhoods.

Both can be true.

Both are true.

This is a dangerous country we live in where, according to Gallup, 44% of homes have guns. A report by Small Arms Survey found that in 2017, there are more than 393.3 million firearms in the United States.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit group named for James Brady, President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was shot in the head in an attack on Reagan’s life in 1981, 321 people are shot every day in the United States; 111 of those people die.

Like it or not, we need police.

We have to stop this: As a doctor, I've seen what an AR-15 does to the body. Unless we act, so will many Americans.

Someone has to be there to protect us from those who show so little respect for life.

Who else is going to rush toward the gunfire when it starts?

You?

Me?

Not likely.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with acknowledging that officers like Wilt and Galloway did their job and should be commended for it, while at the same time believing there are deep cultural problems within LMPD that need to be addressed.

Joseph Gerth is a columnist at the Louisville Courier-Journal, where this column first ran. Follow him on Twitter: @Joe_Gerth