It was a bittersweet moment on election night last November when Russell Coleman took the stage at a Louisville hotel to address a crowd of the Republican faithful.
Yes, he had just won his race for Kentucky attorney general. But his good friend Daniel Cameron, then the sitting attorney general, had lost his bid for governor of the commonwealth. Coleman says the two had frequently talked during the campaign about how they would partner as governor and attorney general to fight crime and drugs in the commonwealth.
“There was the personal component to see my friend not be successful,” recalls Coleman. “And then the professional: All of the things that he and I had talked about, how we could collaborate together to tackle some of these challenges, all of that changes.”
So the next day, Coleman says he reached out to Gov. Andy Beshear, the incumbent Democrat who defeated Cameron, to see how they could work together.
“I have a job to do,” says Coleman. “When it makes sense to do so to try to protect lives, I’ll do whatever it takes in working with his administration.”
But that doesn’t mean he won’t push back when the Beshear Administration might try to contest laws passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature.
“My job is to execute what the General Assembly tells me to do under the constitution,” says Coleman, “and there naturally will be some tension there dependent upon whether the governor decides to challenge those measures.”
Reducing Violent Crime in Metro Louisville
In many respects, Coleman is tailor-made for the job of attorney general. The Paducah native is a former prosecutor and FBI special agent and was the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky in the Trump Administration. He also briefly served as a spokesman for the Kentucky Smart on Crime Coalition, which advocates for criminal sentencing reform and better reintegration policies for former offenders. Coleman says wanting rehabilitation and reentry supports doesn’t mean he won’t be tough on criminals.
“I believe in punishment, I believe that there should be negative outcomes for negative behaviors,” the attorney general says. “I believe in deterrence. I believe in isolation of the most violent offenders.”
Coleman also worked hard to build relationships in African American neighborhoods in West Louisville and among the families there who he says are so often the victims of violent crime. He says it “broke my heart” to see those relations shattered in the fallout over the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests.
As attorney general, Coleman says he wants to restore the dialogue with people in West Louisville.
“I absolutely will be working brick by brick to try to build back some of those relationships or build them when they weren’t present,” he says. “I want to protect those families.”
During the gubernatorial campaign, former Attorney General Cameron called for a Kentucky State Police post in Louisville to help fight crime in Jefferson County. Beshear opposed the idea, saying it would take vital KSP resources away from the rest of the state.
While Coleman says more law enforcement generally means safer communities, he says the notion of launching a Louisville post is no longer a “live issue.” But he says crime in the city must be addressed.
“We’re pushing 200 homicides (a year) in Louisville now,” says Coleman. “So when I talk about Louisville being on fire, that’s just not a metaphor.”
While he was U.S. attorney, Coleman increased federal firearms prosecutions by 70 percent in 2019 in hopes of curbing gun crimes in the city. Yet Jefferson County still saw some 90 homicides that year, he says. He says Louisville must look to other cities for innovative ways to combine aggressive prosecution with efforts to address the root causes of crime, including mental health issues and a lack of jobs and job training.
Finding New Approaches to Fighting the Drug Epidemic
One of Coleman’s first acts as attorney general was to install a new executive director of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, which is charged with distributing some $450 million the state received in opioid settlements. He calls Chris Evans, a former acting administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, an “absolute superstar.”
Coleman says he and Evans want to use those funds to make whole the people and communities broken by the drug epidemic.
“You have to have, of course, a strong enforcement piece, you have to have strong treatment,” the attorney general says, “but what we’re short-shrifting is the prevention.”
Coleman says his team will look across the country for successful prevention models to implement here. One of those models already exists in the commonwealth: Operation UNITE, an anti-drug initiative in southeastern Kentucky launched in 2003 by Congressman Hal Rogers. Coleman says UNITE includes sophisticated educational activities that go far beyond the old “Just Say No” campaigns of the 1980s. He says that kind of approach could be replicated across the state to help teach children about the dangers of drug abuse. Coleman contends in an age when a single dose of fentanyl can kill a person, such thorough outreach to youth is critical.
“What I pledge to you is we will have multiple scaled-up prevention efforts in this commonwealth,” he says. “We have to, to protect our kids.”
