INDIANAPOLIS — The Capitol City is now over the 200 homicide mark for the year 2021.
Two more people were shot in Indianapolis over the weekend. One was Saturday evening along 11th street, near Rural Street and 10th Street, where police found a man shot in a car. The second-weekend homicide happened late Sunday evening. A man was also found shot in a car only a few blocks south of where the first shooting happened on Saturday.
The city’s homicide tally now sits at 201 people killed this year.
“I am shocked by where we are,” said Rev. Charles Harrison of the Iny Ten Point Coalition to WISH-TV. “I never thought we would be at 200 homicides. When you go back to 2012, we would panic when we got above 100 homicides.”
2012 was the last year that Indianapolis saw less than 100 homicides for a calendar year. Harrison blames a poor shift in strategy to deal with violent crime by the Indianapolis City-County Council around that time. Harrison said the council shifted thousands of dollars away from crime prevention programs that were working to more programs to figure out the root cause of violent crime.
He says the neglect of crime prevention has created a revolving door of criminals.
“Twenty years ago, (we didn’t have) people that were repeat-violent-offenders being arrested and then right back out on the street,” said Harrison. “If you are going to have a high number of shootings and stabbings, you are going to have a high number of homicides — and we have to bring that down.”
Of the homicides committed this year so far, they include a seven-year-old girl and her three family members from March and the April FedEx shooting victims. July has been the most violent month thus far as 32 people were killed during that time span.
