INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (Sept. 11, 2015) – In the last 48 hours, there have been seven shootings in Indianapolis. But many of them occurred outside the city’s crime fighting focus areas. This has Hoosiers asking if the city is focusing their efforts in the right neighborhoods.
Thursday night, a woman was shot just blocks away from Butler’s campus. Thursday afternoon, an Indiana State Police Trooper was shot in the hand. Three of the seven shootings resulted in deaths. But looking at their locations, many are far from IMPD’s target crime areas.
Last month IMPD Chief Rick Hite was asked if the locations of the department’s focus areas are accurate.
“We talked about the areas we know are traditional, but we’ve also seen some nontraditional things happen as a result of the data collection. We’re seeing people operate who we historically thought in Indianapolis lived and worked in the same neighborhood, but often times they’re arrested in other parts of the community and we have never tracked that,” he said.
But as of August 31, of the non-deadly shootings this year in Indy, 70 percent have occurred outside the target areas. The same goes for homicides, with 27 percent happening in the city’s focus areas.
“Pretty simple, we’ve got too many gangs, too many drugs, and too many guns,” said William Foley, an IUPUI public safety lecturer.
Foley says crime fighting in 2015 is not what it once was. Spillover he says is inevitable and while the focus areas have their fair share of violence, IMPD will likely have to re-evaluate where they put their police presence.
“They continually readjust by zone. So you’ve got districts and zones, that’s what IMPD does. They continue to make adjustments in these areas,” he said.
Overall, crime is down slightly in the city’s focus areas.
