A good friend of mine (who is a crucial ally to Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett) and I occasionally engage in some harmless ribbing. He and I were recently talking about crime, and he told me the next time that I wrote about the subject, to take the same position that I did under Mayor Greg Ballard and write that there was nothing the mayor could do about crime and violence in the city. He’s about to get his wish.
As I write this column, we are about to cross the Rubicon into another year of record murders here in Indy. So far this year, the city of Indianapolis is averaging a death every 2.3 days.
Criminal homicide statistics provided by IMPD show 147 murders between Jan. 1 and Dec. 10. Of the 147 murder victims, local adult criminal histories were found for 88 (60 percent) of the victims. These 38 individuals accounted for 386 adult felony arrests. That number was 66 percent in June. Of the 75 suspects where a name was known, prior local adult criminal histories were found for 41 (55 percent) of the suspects. These 41 people accounted for 174 adult felony arrests.
There have been nine juvenile murder victims so far this year and eight suspects under the age of 18. One of the suspects was involved in a triple murder. And here are a few more murder stats:
-32 percent of the murders occurred in the northeast district.
-The age of the average murder victim was 33.
-The age of the average suspect was 27.
-In 71 percent of the murders, the relationship between the victim and suspect was unknown.
-130 of the 147 victims were killed by gunshots.
-In 93 of the 147 murders, the motive was unknown.
-40 percent of the murders occurred between September and November.
-Sunday was the day a murder was most likely to occur.
-Murders were most likely to occur between midnight and 1 a.m. or 10–11 p.m.
I won’t go into the fact that Blacks are about 25 percent of Indy’s population and have been 66 percent of the murder victims this year, but the whole “Black-on-Black” crime is another discussion for another day.
The Hogsett administration announced a “new” anti-crime plan, which involved a new violence prevention coordinator, city outreach workers (they were called neighborhood resource officers under another administration) and increasing the number of beats that officers will patrol, even though there won’t be that many more officers.
Now this plan comes after this summer’s anti-crime plan, which included holding a youth summit and a public service information campaign to get communities to work with law enforcement. It’s hard to tell if it worked since Indianapolis had 37 murders in June, July and August, and 21 murders the prior three months. I think we can all agree that whatever the city was doing, a course correction is in order because there have been 59 murders in the past three months. And if you want some more depressing math, 40 percent of all the murders in Indianapolis this year have taken place in the past three months.
And if you’re wondering why I haven’t used my “self-cleaning oven” reference (when one bad guy with a criminal record shoots and kills another bad guy with a criminal record) it’s because it doesn’t apply as much this year as it did in previous years, when the percentage of victims and suspects with criminal records was in the 70–80 percent range. This year, those numbers are down drastically; only 60 percent of the victims have prior criminal records, and only 55 percent of the suspects. That is a fundamental shift from what we’ve seen in the past. Also the data shows that in 71 percent of the murder cases, the relationship between the victim and suspect was unknown, and in 63 percent of the cases, the motives were unknown.
So let’s summarize what we have here: record murders, but fewer felons as victims and suspects, and the motives and relationships surrounding the killings are mostly unknown. My good friend who is a key Hogsett administration ally got his wish. Looking at this data, and the efforts by city hall so far, there is nothing Joe Hogsett can do about Indy’s murder problem.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is an attorney, political commentator and publisher of IndyPolitics.org. You can email comments to him at abdul@indypolitics.org.
