Indy Launches Top-to-Bottom Review of Ways to Rethink IMPD
(INDIANAPOLIS) — Indianapolis is launching a sweeping review of how it approaches police work, and how to rethink that approach.
New York University law professor Anne Milgram will lead the discussion of how to move issues like
truancy and homelessness to the center of how the city fights crime. The former New Jersey attorney general led the reorganization of Camden, New Jersey’s, police department 10 years ago, moving the department under county control and instituting a more community-focused approach.
Milgram says Indy is the first real opportunity since Camden to do it again. She says the city’s already been working with NYU on what she calls innovative approaches to how police interact with people who are mentally ill. And she says there’s buy-in at every level, something that’s often a hurdle to overcome. Mayor Joe Hogsett says he’s told City-County Council leaders “nothing is off limits” when the recommendations begin coming in.
Hogsett says there will be regular “report cards” to the community charting police progress toward the new measures of success the review will generate.
Hogsett says the protests and riots over the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis have exposed deep and longstanding mistrust of the police in Indy’s minority communities. He says the protests directly inspired the commitment to accelerate efforts to address community concerns about fairness in policing.
Hogsett’s chief counsel Tim Moriarty will lead a separate review of how police responded to the protests. Moriarty says it’ll be an overall look at what police did and the procedures which guided them, not just a review of specific incidents. Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears is already looking at some police actions, and IMPD is doing an internal review.
