Violent Crime

Posted on by Jim Cotterill

According to U.S. News and World Report, Indianapolis has earned the designation of being the “12th Most Dangerous Place in the U.S. in 2020-21”.

We talk about how dangerous cities like Chicago and New York are, but based on a comparison of murders and property crime rates per 100,000 people, the Windy City and the Big Apple can’t hold a candle to Indy. In fact, Chicago and NYC didn’t even make U.S. News’ Top 25!

According to records maintained by Indianapolis Star, in 2019 we had a total of 154 criminal homicides in Indianapolis, and, sadly, we set yet a new record of 215 criminal homicides in 2020. That’s just a fraction short of a 40 percent increase in killings in a single year right here in our own hometown!

Homicides are the leading cause of death for 18 to 24-year old men in our urban area and the second leading cause of death for 25 to 34-year old men.

On paper these are just numbers, statistics, but they represent the lives of fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, grandfathers, uncles, and in too many cases they’re mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, and close friends—215 human lives senselessly taken.

There’s a direct correlation between poverty and violent crime. In the areas of our city where poverty was on the increase, nearly 13 percent of the people earned less than $10,000 per year, and there was a 600 percent greater likelihood of murders and non-fatal shootings.

There are a number of different groups working to turn this situation around.

Some hospitals have intervention programs, working with adults recovering from gunshot wounds or other forms of assault in an effort to prevent immediate retaliation as well as future aggression.

There are several organizations that focus on youth to prevent them from turning to crime. There are those that mentor young people, both those at risk but without a record and others coming out of the juvenile justice system in an effort to keep them from returning and entering into a revolving door of incarceration.

Many are strong efforts carried out with the best of intentions. The problem is that there is very little collaboration. Rather than sharing information, which could result in benefit to others, most initiatives continue to operate in silos.

There is also extreme disagreement on how to effectively ratchet down the number of criminal homicides and non-fatal shootings. Some lean towards more strict law enforcement. Others want to see the emphasis on forgiveness and efforts to rehabilitate.

Another approach might be to swallow our Hoosier pride and take a best practices approach. In previously gang-ridden Oakland, California, a faith-based approach, Live Free, is credited with six straight years of progress, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in gun violence. If this approach worked as advertised, and we had put it to work in Indianapolis when proposed to city leaders few years ago, hundreds more of our young people would be alive to return home tonight.

If we hope to make real headway in this fight, instead of opposing the person with a differing opinion regarding how to bring an end to the senseless loss of human life, we need to unite against the common enemy that is depriving our neighbors of friends and family members, learn to listen to each other in an effort to understand why others believe what they do, and even if we still don’t agree, we need to be able to calmly discuss all options proposed by others. Otherwise, we are sentencing young people to the morgue, which is already overflowing with bodies!

Too often serious injury—both physical and mental—is caused as a result of domestic violence. In fact, police report that entering the home following a report of domestic violence is among the most dangerous of situations they encounter.

The pervasive sense of hopelessness people feel as a result of living in poverty too often results in the commission of a crime as a means of lashing out, retribution, or just plain survival. So it stands to reason that, anything we can do to reduce the number of those living in poverty can only have a positive impact on crime statistics as well as these other interrelated issues:

The Number of Violent Crimes (per 1,000 population) by neighborhood within Marion County, Indiana, can be found HERE.

What can you do to impact Violent Crime in Indianapolis? Click HERE.

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Jim Cotterill