The article is very long form Pulitizer-level effort with chapters and lots of photos, videos, and audio interviews. I will just offer what is one partial excerpt of one "chapter" that I think is of extra import:

‘This Agency Isn’t Really Built for Us’

The fumbled raid that resulted in the young woman’s death was paradoxically set in motion by an attempt at police reform.

The impetus came in spring 2019, when a video went viral showing a Black teenager being pulled over and handcuffed. He was his high school’s homecoming king. His offense was making a wide turn.

The department would be sued at least three times that year for racial bias by Black motorists. They included the teenager, who had borrowed his mother’s car to get a slushy; a father and his 9-year-old son, who were boxed in by police cars for failing to signal; and a man and his caregiver who were stopped for an obstructed windshield, then told to stand barefoot on the asphalt as the car was searched.

In each instance, the police looked for drugs and found none.

The week that the video of the teenager was uploaded to YouTube coincided with a visit to the department by Robin Engel, the director of the University of Cincinnati Center for Police Research and Policy. Her research helped shape a model of policing credited with cutting violent crime in Cincinnati and Las Vegas.

She recalled that the police chief at the time, Steve Conrad, asked her: How can we do better?

Tensions between the Louisville department and the city’s Black residents had accrued over decades of heavy-handed policing and discriminatory practices. A federal consent decree in the 1980s required the department to hire one Black officer for every two white recruits, with the goal of raising Black representation on the force to 15 percent. Nearly 40 years later, in a city that is almost one-quarter African-American, only 10 percent of the force’s 1,154 officers are Black, according to a spokeswoman.

“The trauma of it, the reality of it, just set in for so many of us that this agency isn’t really built for us,” said Charles Booker, a state representative in Kentucky who is Black.

What Ms. Engel proposed was a departure from traditional practices in Louisville and other cities. Instead of targeting a large area for frequent traffic stops or going after specific criminals who are quickly replaced, focus on micro-locations: a storefront, a parking lot, a city block. The idea was to identify spots conducive to crime and adopt remedies, like cutting tall grass in a neighborhood where felons hide guns, or putting “No Parking” signs along a street where drug dealers idle in cars.

In December 2019, the Louisville Police created its Place-Based Investigations unit, and after analyzing crime statistics, decided to focus on Elliott Avenue, a street of dilapidated and abandoned houses, according to city records.

Nearly every year since 2014, a timeline provided by the city shows that at least one killing occurred there, most of them on the 2400 block. In 2014, a teenage girl was shot multiple times; in 2015, a 49-year-old man was doused in lighter fluid and set on fire; in 2016, a man was fatally shot; in 2018, a homicide victim was found in his home; and in 2019, a bystander died in a shootout, according to city records. [....]