OG Returns to Call Out Indy Anti-Violence Programs

INDIANAPOLIS — When it comes to violence on the streets of Indianapolis, Shane Shepherd has a pedigree that grants him OG status.

”When we came up, it was the early part of the dope game. I came up when it was still powder. It was the 80s, and it was getting money, so money was everything,” Shepherd said. “Then in the 90s, people started killing each other, and they were all six and seven years older than me.”

”Everybody ahead of me fell, I became the big homie. Look how young I was,” he continued. “I was the biggest homie for a while, and I was, what, 22? 23? Because of what? Money, violence, influence.”

Shepherd was in his mid-20s and headed for a fall when FOX59/CBS4 first profiled him and his criminal ways in 2004. Homicide detectives tried and failed to pin four murders on him.

Shepherd admitted he was slinging dope and popping out of the sunroof of an SUV tooling down North Harding Street, spraying bullets at whoever was following him back then.

It was a gun charge that sent Shepherd to a federal prison in Colorado for 12 years, where he met former Black Panther H. Rap Brown, who challenged him to leave his gangster ways behind.

Shepherd returned to Indianapolis, mourned the murder of his sister, and established B4UFall as a westside anti-violence organization in the same streets where he used to run.

”I was there just like every other man in federal prison; you become remorseful about the mistakes you make,” he said in Watkins Park on Tuesday. ”I never count me out, but I do know the path that I was on only had two endings, and I ended up with the lesser of the two evils, which was the federal penitentiary.”

Shepherd was an early participant in Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration’s build-out of the Office of Public Health and Safety dedicated to supporting community-based groups in the city’s fight against violence.

From the start, Shepherd, drawing on his past and criminal justice experience, chafed at the way OPHS went about fulfilling its mission.

” It’s never been a person from the field,” he said, noting that OPHS leadership was “always either female oriented, European oriented when we’re dealing with young Black males.

”You’re afraid to put in a person who is community-related because you’re afraid that somehow, someway, they’ll have an army.”

Shepherd admits he’s atoned for the people who followed his lead and suffered when he was running a crew on the northwest side two decades ago.

”Cuz now that y’all didn’t pay attention to the west side like you said, Harding, riding out of drop tops and shooting and stuff, they doing it downtown where you care at. You still can’t stop ‘em. You got surveillance, you got people, you got a non-profit group supposed to be over downtown hiring security groups to walk around; they’re like another extension of the police. If the real police can’t stop ‘em, what makes you think your fake police gonna do it?”

A recent city audit of $45 million dedicated to OPHS programming during a three-year period found contractual, programmatic and ethical shortcomings and unaccountability when it came to linking the city’s recent drop in crime to the massive spending of federal funds.

Earlier this year, IMPD reported that youth crime was up by seven percent.

Shepherd has reorganized his non-profit as the Steve. E. Shepherd Community Corporation, named after his father who died of a fentanyl poisoning, and partnered with Big Homies of America to train ex-felons for working in the carpentry industry.

His life was threatened a few years ago. Shepherd relocated to Florida, where he’s into gardening, raising chickens and bass fishing, and observing Indianapolis’ growing reputation from afar for violent crime being committed by children without streetwise adult mentors around them.

”I think the reason for that is they don’t have a moral code. See, we still had a moral code because we came up out of the 80s. We came out of the Reagan era when Black families were still together, trying to make something happen for themselves,” he said. ”If these are the people who are afforded to have guns, have access to money, that’s the thing, and then social media, this combination of things plus the male ego right after puberty, it’s a problem. So if you don’t allow old bull elephants to come back into the jungle when new elephants come into the zoo or the enclosure, they’re gonna tear it up because they don’t know how to respect the itching tree, they don’t know how to respect the watering pond. That’s the same thing that’s happening here.”