In this second installment, Democratic Socialist JP Lyninger sits down with freelance writer Charlie Cy to discuss the key local issues that animated his victorious District Six Metro Council campaign—including reducing the LMPD budget, increasing social services spending, creating a public grocery store, municipalizing LG&E and reforming TARC. JP and Charlie would also explore the topic of class vis-à-vis race politics.
Need to catch up on part 1? You can do that right here:
The Conversation: Part II
Crime & Punishment – Throwing Money at LMPD Hasn’t Worked – Lawsuits Hold Taxpayers Accountable, Not Police – Contract Negotiated in Secret – “Blue Flu” – Traffic Enforcement and Mad Max – Addressing Root Causes of Crime – Downtown Jail
Charlie Cy: You’ve said you want to cut the LMPD budget. And obviously crime is an issue for constituents. How are you going to get a critical mass of your colleagues on the Metro Council to both lower the police budget and raise accountability?
JP Lyninger: There’s already movement in that direction. Starting in 2020, there was an actual stink raised about the police contract for the first time and about the police budget. Now, just like everywhere else, people are under the mistaken impression that there was some sort of “Defund the Police” [reckoning] that happened. Certainly not true.
We have, every year since merger [the 2003 consolidation of Louisville and Jefferson County], increased what we spend on police. We have more than doubled what we spend on police and jails. And we’re not better off. We’re not safer.
It’s been a 20-year experiment, and [the thesis has been], if we just throw more money at police, we will be safer. We will be better off.
And I would talk to people at the doors. And they would say my big concern is crime. And there is a little bit of crime panic in the United States. In suburban [environs], people have this idea that downtown Louisville is on fire from riots 24-hours-a-day. But you go talk to people in Algonquin and Park Hill. Guess what? Crime and violence is a real problem in their lives.
We have just a gigantic surge in murders. And those areas are terribly impacted. They’re in the district.
Again, I walked all of those blocks and talked to people personally about it, and they would answer the door, and they would say their big concern is crime and violence and not feeling safe in their neighborhood, and those concerns were real. And so, I would talk to the people about how the reason we have these problems with crime and violence is because we are not addressing what causes crime and violence.
We have thrown all this money at policing to try to solve it on the back end, and that didn’t work. And it didn’t work because what we don’t have are community centers and afterschool programs, places where kids can be safe and have mentorship in their lives—who have positive influence.
We don’t have programs to support the working class and people that live precarious lives. A lot of these crimes are just desperation. If people don’t have an idea that things can be better, that better things are possible in their lives, it makes it a lot easier for them to turn to gangs, violent crime, addiction. These things that are driving real social problems in our lives, it’s because we are leaving people behind, and we aren’t taking care of people in our society.
Here’s the thing. You look at crime in the West End, violence in the West End, to me, there are only two things you can come away believing. Either you think that there’s some problem with the people there, right, or there’s some problem in how we have developed society. And if you’re not going to be a racist, you’ve got to say to yourself, “Okay, these people that have all these huge pressures on them economically and systemically. We aren’t addressing those problems. And in fact, we’re making these problems worse. Maybe that has something to do with it.”
And I would talk to people at the doors about: you don’t have swimming pools for kids in the summer . . . you don’t have all these programs that we used to have. Remember, we grew up and we had these things.
And people would say, “Yeah. I do remember that. I do remember when we had a lot of community input in kids’ lives, and places for kids to be in.” Like afterschool, you had somewhere you could go play ball or work on your homework, and maybe get a little something to eat and drink and be taken care of. People remembered that. And I said, “These are choices we’re making in the budget. If things are going to get better, that’s how we do it.”
Because we tried everything else. We tried throwing money at it. One of the things people would say is, “I miss there being beat cops that walked on the street, and we had relationships with police officers.”
And, we just had this program where we invited LMPD officers to come live where they serve with big financial incentives. Zero took the city up on it. We have a mentality of an occupying force. This is a population to be managed—when you see police officers in Louisville right now.
Charlie Cy: They show up in packs, right?
JP Lyninger: Yeah, you’ve got four squad cars and eight officers talking to one person. That sort of overwhelming force display.
Charlie Cy: It’s intimidating . . .
JP Lyninger: Right? Who is that serving? Who does that help? There has clearly been a response to 2020, that said, “We don’t like the critique you had of the police department in Louisville and nationally,” and the response to that has not been to build better ties to the community.
Charlie Cy: Do you think that’s coming from up top? Or is it the worker-bee beat cops creating this mentality?
JP Lyninger: I think there’s a culture problem. And part of that is a commitment from the city to reducing accountability. For one thing, something I’ve talked to people about, we agree in our society that lawsuits are an important mechanism for correcting behavior.
We create these economic systems where you messed up, there’s a financial penalty. You’re going to pay for it. And you’re going to learn, “don’t do that again.” Lawsuits against the LMPD do not come out of LMPD’s budget. They come out of the general fund. Someone’s civil rights are abused. When people are harmed. When people are killed. When those lawsuits pay out, they, [LMPD], don’t pay for it. You and I do. That’s a problem.
And we have a police contract negotiated in secret without the input of the Metro Council. It’s brought before the Metro Council – accomplished – and they say, “vote ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And if you vote ‘no’, you’re not going to have cops. Here’s a gun to your head. Vote for this contract.”
The contract says that there can never be force reductions. In the most recent round [of contract negotiations], it reduced discipline. That’s insane. I do not believe the majority of people in Louisville think that we need to reduce police discipline. So, if we’re going to have police accountability, there must be changes.
Charlie Cy: How does the negotiation work? You have the FOP, and you have the Metro Council . . .
JP Lyninger: The mayor’s office. It’s between the mayor and the FOP.
Charlie Cy: And the FOP tells the mayor what they want, and the mayor says “yes” or “no.” Is that how it works?
JP Lyninger: Yep. And they hammer out the agreement.
Charlie Cy: Behind closed doors?
JP Lyninger: They have a memorandum of understanding for the FOP contract. When we say contract, there are in fact two different ones. But they hammer those out. And then those go before the Metro Council.
Because so much of what we spend is on police and jails, you have to do those contracts and the budget concurrently or else it’s not going to make sense, financially. And you end up with this very rushed process where the council has had minimal input, and even minimal chance to review the document. That has to change. That absolutely has to change. It’s the most important negotiation that the city does every time that it comes up. More of the city should be involved.
Charlie Cy: So “blue flu” as you called it, is real?
JP Lyninger: Yes.
Charlie Cy: Do You think it’s still taking place?
JP Lyninger: So, a year and a half ago, a woman broke into our house. It was super early in the morning. My kids were asleep upstairs. We heard this woman come into our house. Our dog freaked out. And so, my wife and I came downstairs, and this woman was houseless. She was disoriented. But also causing a problem.
And we said, “Listen. You have to go. There are kids here. We’re sympathetic. You have to go. This is not a place for you. Can we help you?”
She turned violent. We tried to get her out of the house. And she got more violent. And so even though I’m not a person who’s predisposed to call the police on a houseless person, I was concerned about the kids. I was concerned about my wife. And I didn’t want my wife to have to be physically violent with this person, or for either of us to have to be physically violent with this person to get her to leave. I didn’t want to hurt her. And so, we called the cops.
And I said, “Hey. There’s a woman in my house. We need her to get out. There are kids here.” It took forever, and I live over on [address edited out], so the police are right there, and it took so long for them to get there in the giant pack like you described.
Police responses are slower. I’ve had people tell me when I was campaigning for Robert [Bell] when he ran for state rep, we did a lot of canvassing in Russell. And, I had people tell me that cops there explicitly said, “Hey, we don’t feel like you guys like us very much. If you want better response times, maybe a little better relationship.” People told me that that happened to them.
Something people talk about all the time right now is driving in Louisville. It’s Mad Max out there. We did not stop buying police cruisers. We spend more on police than we did in 2020. We spend more on police than we did in 2019. There’s no traffic enforcement. Everyone knows that it’s more dangerous to drive in Louisville than it was four years ago. Everybody knows that. And right now, there’s this big public push about the street racing.
Charlie Cy: Is that an issue?
JP Lyninger: It’s an issue. But day to day, that’s not a big concern with vehicular safety and our streets. That’s not why we’re not safe as pedestrians or on bicycles. It’s that driving is dangerous. I’d also like to see systemic changes about transportation and making things safer and less car reliant. But also, with what we currently have, people do not feel like traffic enforcement is happening the way it used to. And it’s tough not to draw conclusions of that’s a subconscious decision.
Charlie Cy: Though the LMPD budget has not decreased, what about the issue of manpower? Could that be an argument on their behalf?
JP Lyninger: They talk about being however many officers short. But our population level is not exploding. How short are we? Are there potentially some policy changes that could improve the amount of coverage you’ve got? Again, I think that it’s a big problem, like we talked about before, that the majority of police interactions you see in Louisville are a giant pile of squad cars stopped in the street. If we do have a manpower problem, that’s not a good use of manpower.
Charlie Cy: How big is the police budget?
JP Lyninger: Shameka Parrish-Wright had a graphic that she put out during the most recent budget – and not everything is on the LMPD line-item, like the new wellness center in Saint Joe’s – but if you go through the budget and say, “this is for cops . . . this is for jails,” and add all of that up, it’s like 50% of the budget [according to] her graphic. And that’s huge. It’s a billion-dollar budget.
And a lot of the size of that pie, we’re constrained by the state. The state puts real limits on how we can raise revenues. That’s why the occupational tax . . . we have unusual funding mechanisms here . . . that’s why your car insurance is so high. We have a huge tax on car insurance.
Charlie Cy: Is that why?
JP Lyninger: Yes. That’s why you pay so much in car insurance; we’re funding our city government through that. That’s stupid. But, again, our hands are tied by the state. And so, we have to be, in my opinion, a lot smarter about how we’re spending our money.
I would tell people, while talking about the police budget and how much we spend, I said, “Listen. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how you feel about the police. How you feel about what the role of police are in our society. If police have civil rights abuses, or if they are the thin blue line and they’re all that stands between us and chaos. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter because we tried the experiment of just throwing money at cops. We tried that experiment for 20 years. It didn’t work. It’s time to try something else.”
People talk about root causes of crime and how we need to address these problems in our society. We talk a lot about it, but where’s the money? Because if you’re not funding solutions to those big problems, if you’re not saying we need to have policy changes, if you’re not saying at the end of the day, we need big changes in how we live and in how we order society even, if you’re not saying that’s what you’re committed to, big or small, then you’re not really doing anything about it. You’re not solving those problems. And so, again, if you’re saying you think these are big problems and you’re saying you think that we need to address root causes of violence and crime and despair in our community and then not doing it, what does that say?
Charlie Cy: The conversation around the downtown Louisville jail, which I believe was never built to be a jail, seems to be another complicated issue, just like funding the police. One side is calling to update or build a new one, and another side is saying we don’t need to spend any more money on a new jail. What are your thoughts on that?
JP Lyninger: Something I said at a town hall that National Action Network put on in this building, during the campaign, was, “We’ve had a lot of deaths in the jail, and a lot of it stems from not treating inmates like people. That’s not just a problem here. That’s a problem throughout America.”
We’ve got a criminal justice system that is obsessed with punishment. Again, I’m a scientifically minded person. We know it doesn’t work. You go look at other countries and recidivism and reform of inmates, people reintroduced into society, we’re doing a terrible job at that.
You can draw one of two conclusions: either we have worse people than they do in Europe, and I don’t think that’s true, or we’re doing something wrong.
People think we need to make our prisons harsher. When we live in a country that’s got a place like Angola Prison. The idea that we need to make punishment harsher to deter crime—we know it doesn’t work. We just know. And so why are we still pursuing that? People are afraid to be seen as not tough on crime. People are afraid to be seen as not taking people’s concerns about crime and violence seriously.
I went out of my way to make sure people understood. I do take it seriously. I think we’re doing it wrong.
District Six: Food Desert – Municipal Grocery Store – LG&E Balance Sheet Benefits Wall Street Shareholders – Bernheim Pipeline, Burning Coal ‘til 2067 and Climate Change – Politicians’ Donors Don’t Take TARC So TARC’s Riders Suffer
Charlie Cy: Something I’m personally interested in hearing more about is the municipal grocery store system you’ve proposed. I find it an interesting idea, especially after you described District Six as a “food desert,” because there is no grocery store in the district.
JP Lyninger: Yes. So, we’ve got this huge need. We used to have a Kroger on Second Street and Breckenridge. And people would say, I want to bring Kroger back. The problem is, when Kroger left, they told the city, “The store is profitable. It’s just not profitable enough.”
And so, when people talk about [how] we just need to offer the right tax incentives to bring a grocer back to Old Louisville or downtown. Stuff like that, that’s the fancy. That’s the pie in the sky. They have decided that it is not profitable enough to shareholders to feed people here and for people to have access to fresh fruit and vegetables. And so, we have to look at solutions that aren’t about the market. That aren’t about satisfying corporate shareholders.
Municipal grocery stores are something that has worked in other places. Chicago is currently looking to create a system. Brandon Johnson up in Chicago has put a lot of money behind [research to answer the question] “Can we do this?” And the studies came back. “Yes. You can and must, actually. This is the solution.”
So, I want to try that here. We set up the grocery store. We sell food to our neighbors at a reasonable price. And does the store need to make a profit? I don’t think it does. This is a need that has to be addressed. This is a common good. But if it does [turn a profit], great. Then we can reinvest it into the stores, make them better. Have more.
But I don’t think that the focus for this program must be or even should be, breaking even, or being profitable. Sort of like the post office. That’s a perennial Republican talking point about how the post office doesn’t make any money. Well, who cares? We need the post office.
That’s how I would see the municipal grocery store system; we have a real problem that people don’t have access to fresh food, and we also have these policy choices that limit people’s access to fresh food, and even beyond not just being there, because we have a public transportation disaster in Louisville.
And so, what are they supposed to do? You can’t tell them to go forever away from their house and back without even a way to get there with a bunch of groceries. We have to think of something else.
Charlie Cy: You talked about lobbying in the state legislature. Are you familiar with how lobbying operates on a local level in terms of what Kroger, and mainly Democrats, would do in terms of your grocery plan? Someone is going to be telling them, “We don’t want this!” Right? What do you anticipate?
JP Lyninger: I do anticipate that there will be pushback on that. The way that capitalism works, the way that corporations work is that their only concern is making money. If you look at it from a business major perspective, it is even morally unjust. That’s their only concern. That’s what they’re only supposed to care about. Right? And so, yeah, of course, they’re going to want to protect profits and say, “We don’t want competition from a municipal grocery system and don’t do this, please.”
I am sure there’ll be significant pushback. Again, I’m just one guy. We’ll see. If people really care, they will come and fight. I want to test that.
Charlie Cy: Are there any other issues you’d like to touch on?
JP Lyninger: Sure. Two things. One, the municipalization of LG&E. Go ask people in Louisville. How thrilled are you to be paying for a private corporation being in charge of our gas and electric bills that you pay and that go to shareholder profits? People don’t love that.
A lot of it’s about political education. When I canvassed people and talked to them about this issue, a lot of people assumed that we already control LG&E. Louisville is in the name. And they were really surprised when I said, “No.” And explained how that worked. That it was a private corporation traded on Wall Street. Not headquartered here. And then people said, “Now, I have zero good opinions about it.”
A lot of people are still very upset about the pipeline at Bernheim. So that’s definitely a way to talk to people about these problems.
Charlie Cy: Can you briefly explain what that pipeline is?
JP Lyninger: It’s a natural gas pipeline that’s going to go through Bernheim Forest and also was going through peoples’ private property, and they didn’t want the pipeline, so they just used imminent domain [to confiscate] the land.
So that’s a real concern. People don’t like that. To me, one of the biggest concerns about LG&E being a private entity is they’re not planning to get off coal until 2067. And I don’t think that voters here in Louisville think that’s a good idea. Climate change is real and 2067 is not when you should start trying to mitigate those effects. That’s not a solution. So as long as corporate shareholders are who LG&E cares about, again, from an economic perspective of a rank-and-file economist, that’s all they are supposed to care about. That’s their job—to care about making money. If all they care about is making money, we’re going to die. So, we have to change something.
Charlie Cy: What’s the second issue?
JP Lyninger: TARC [Transit Authority of River City]. The fiscal cliff with TARC. I was at the fiscal TARC board meeting when they made the decision to cut routes and stops. And they talked about the fiscal cliff from the end of federal financial support for TARC that we’ve been relying on since the pandemic.
But everybody knew that was coming. People knew it was coming. We have a funding mechanism for TARC that has not been changed since the seventies. We’ve got huge problems with public transportation in Louisville, and the working class needs TARC. That’s the beginning and the end. We need public transportation in Louisville for people to be able to get to work, to get to school, to take care of their family.
We know we need more public transportation because, again, climate change. There is zero reason we shouldn’t be investing in public transportation and expanding it. But it is treated as an extremely low priority by our government, because their donors don’t take the TARC. And we have to change that.
We need robust, reliable, safe, clean public transportation in Louisville and that’s going to take money. That’s just true. But it’s doable. We can do it. But we’re going to have to choose to invest in public transportation. Again, anyone who says they care about the working class in Louisville but doesn’t care enough about TARC to make changes, I question that. Anyone who says, I believe climate change is real but isn’t willing to expand public transportation in Louisville and make it a primary transportation option for people throughout the city, not just along the Broadway corridor, [I question their intentions].
If you’re not committed to that, do you really think climate change is real? If you do think climate change is real and you’re still not [prioritizing these changes], then I’ve got real questions. So, I want to go fight for that.
Charlie Cy: What are some bullet points of changes you’d like to see made to fix TARC?
JP Lyninger: We need to expand TARC. We need more routes. More stops. We have an austerity budget, which again, they’re all austerity budgets now. But we called it an austerity budget, back . . . seven . . . eight years ago, when we reduced TARC. We reduced stops. Reduced routes. We made TARC less reliable. And when we made TARC less reliable, fewer people used TARK. Because if you can’t trust it to get you to work, and you can’t trust it to get you to school or to a doctor’s appointment, you can’t use it.
And so, we made TARC less reliable. People stopped using it, and so fares go down. Fares go down. There’s less money for TARC. TARC gets worse. Fares go down.
Fares as a funding mechanism don’t really make sense. This is a conversation nationally that a lot of people really point out that studies show that public transportation is better off and probably even makes more financial sense, free at point-of-service funded as a public good. So, I do think that’s part of the solution, but also just [that] we need to raise more money for TARC.
I think there should be a change in the occupational tax to put more money dedicated to TARC. I think that there should be a TARC line-item in the metro budget.
Charlie Cy: There’s not?
JP Lyninger: There’s not. And I think that we need to do a much better job of financially supporting TARC. And then you can start talking about how we tweak the routes to make them more efficient. But it starts with: we don’t have enough. And that’s just money. That’s the only thing that can do it.
Unions, Class Solidarity and Fighting ‘the Boss’ Together – “Capitalism Requires Racism” – DJT and Demographics – Democrats Abandoned Working Class Messaging – Ceded Ground to Right Wing Populism – Scolding Voters Doesn’t Work – Grandmother’s FDR Shrine
Charlie Cy: What about race and class? Do you think the working-class message is a good way to unite people across historic divisions?
JP Lyninger: Yes. So, you look at gains we’ve made in this country. Solidarity comes first. You look at the way that unions fought against systemic racism. A lot of unions fought against systemic racism. Because once you’ve got workers fighting together against the boss, then a lot of those divisions melt away.
Something, that I’m very honest about is being an anti-capitalist. And it is a stone-cold fact, capitalism requires racism. We as human beings are not naturally comfortable with some people having everything and some people having nothing. And when you zoom out and look at the world, capitalism has created this system of winners and losers. There are people who live desperate, awful lives, well below any standard in the United States. Right? And racism is how we say those people deserve less. Those people don’t deserve to have as nice a life as us.
Fundamentally, that “othering” is required by capitalism. Because you can’t order our capitalist system so that everyone can have the standard of living we have. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t math. There’s no way to do it.
And so, to me, that’s a first-order problem. And we work backwards from that to say, well, we should solve that problem. People have this idea of racism as a guy in the Ku Klux Klan robe. And that’s still for most people, that’s racism.
That’s not racism. I don’t think that we can continue in a system that requires inequality, and fundamentally fight back against the real kind of racism, where people are protecting their position in society in systemic racism—ways big and small. And if you look at how we have deemphasized class, as an organizing principle, we’ve got racism problems that are persistent, and we’ve got these really wrong ideas about political coalitions and what’s going to cause change in America.
Something a lot of people scratch their heads about in polling is how Donald Trump has gone up with Black Americans. Donald Trump has gone way up with Latinx Americans. And you look at the Rio Grand River Valley in Texas where Trump polls way ahead. It’s just gone higher in 2020 than it was in 2016. And it’s higher now than it was in 2020. And it’s because we’re not talking about class.
And if you just assume that racial minorities are going to vote for Democrats until the end of time; the [maxim] “demographics is destiny” is something that people pounded for decades in the Democratic party. The sunny days are ahead, and we’ll never lose again because demographics are destiny and as this country gets less white, Democrats can’t lose. Well, it’s looking like that’s not true.
The Democratic party has, by and large, abandoned working-class messaging, which I have a big problem with. Big picture wise, if you abandon working-class appeal, populist appeal to the right, that’s fascism. That’s how you end up with fascism. And it’s to me very dangerous in that sense. I think it’s also a loser politically.
Why are we not talking to working-class people? Not just about their interests. People love to do chickens for Colonel Sanders, scolding union workers or the working-class who are de-aligned and listening to Republican messaging, which doesn’t work. The idea is you’re going to scold voters and fix them? That doesn’t work.
You’d think we’d have learned that lesson by now. But you’re not offering to fight for them. You aren’t centering the working class in your messaging. The closest they’ll come is talking about middle class, which, there are millionaires who identify themselves as middle class.
But you need real material policy change. Things you’re going to fight for. There was 40 years where, an entire generation of voters was owned by the Democratic party because of FDR. My grandmother, who lived in our house when I was growing up, had a literal FDR shrine in her room. This is 40 years after he was dead. 50 years after he was dead!
Charlie Cy: What happened to those people?
JP Lyninger: We stopped fighting for people like that. And then we’re surprised that we’re not getting that kind of resonance with voters.
This article appears in LEO Weekly presents Readers’ Choice 2024.