by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
Let me get ahead of the email. Last summer I wrote a column warning downtown was sliding into lawlessness, and the Fourth of July proved it in the worst way imaginable. So nobody gets to call me a cheerleader here — save the “soft on crime” routine for somebody else. Now let’s talk about what the numbers say.
Around 4:30 this morning, before most of us had coffee, shots rang out at Meridian and Washington, south of Monument Circle. Two people hit, both stable, nobody in cuffs yet. Before the sun was up, the story did what it always does: convinced everybody scrolling that downtown’s a war zone and the city’s going to the dogs.
That corner has coughed up this headline in 2023, 2024, 2025, and again today. The Circle is the gem of our city — which is exactly why a teenager with an AR-15 leads the newscast while a burglary in Beech Grove never airs.
Here’s what nobody wants printed next to the scary stuff: the rest of Indianapolis has gotten safer. Markedly. In 2021 — the deadliest year this city ever recorded — we buried 241 murder victims. Last year, IMPD counted about 133. That’s down roughly 45 percent in four years and 20-some in a single one — the fewest killings since 2016. Non-fatal shootings, robberies, aggravated assaults — all down double digits. Chris Bailey — the chief who oversaw that drop, now the mayor’s chief of staff — will tell you every category fell, 300 officers short of a full department. To be clear, that’s not Bailey arguing fewer cops mean less crime — it’s the opposite. The crime dropped despite the department running short, and more officers on the street make it easier for the ones already out there to do the job. The “fewer cops, less crime” read is mine, not his.
So why does it feel like the opposite? Because it almost always does. Americans have believed crime was rising in just about every year — including the ones it fell off a cliff. But here’s the part I’d ask my own team to sit with: the folks now most sure the streets are aflame are Republicans — 69 percent say crime’s climbing — with a Republican in the White House and the numbers dropping. Perception used to be a thermometer. Now it’s a team jersey.
Don’t believe me? Don’t fly to Washington — drive to Fort Wayne. Two days ago the Indiana FOP voted, unanimously, no confidence in Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears, in a resolution built on “record levels of violence” and Indy crime “spilling over” into the doughnut counties. Jim Banks calls Mears “a prosecutor gone rogue.” Carmel Mayor Sue Finkam says we “export” crime and her folks pay for it. One problem: “record violence” doesn’t square with IMPD’s own numbers — collected by the cops whose union cast that vote. You can’t have record violence and an eight-year low in the same town in the same year. One’s a number. The other’s a feeling wearing a badge. And now there’s serious talk of impeaching him — or just letting the governor appoint his replacement — over charging calls voters settle in November.
Any licensed attorney who’s read the state constitution should be able to tell you this: you can’t impeach a county prosecutor in Indiana. Impeachment is reserved for state officers, and prosecutors aren’t on the list — adding them takes a constitutional amendment, two separately elected legislatures, and a statewide vote. Even Chris Jeter, the Republican who wrote the prosecutor-oversight law, calls it a non-starter that’d burn an entire session and accomplish nothing. We have elections for this.
Look — I’m not waving any of this away. If you own a shop on the Circle, that perception is your reality — and we get it. Maybe you’ve swept up your own glass; you lie awake over your staff, your customers, your bottom line. That’s not a talking point; it’s a Tuesday. Pull the phony trend line and a real argument survives. Finkam and Republican challenger Philip Foust aren’t claiming we logged more murders; they’re claiming repeat violent offenders keep cycling out the door. That’s accountability, not crime volume, and the two aren’t the same thing however often they’re stapled together. You can think Foust has a point and still know the city’s safer than four years ago. Both fit in one skull.
Except the case that should’ve been their Exhibit A blew up in their faces. When Brett Scrogham — 23, a Kelley grad in town for an Indians game — was murdered in a downtown parking garage last month, it was the nightmare the fear keeps promising. Banks pinned it on Mears before anyone knew who pulled the trigger. Then police named the suspect: a 14-year-old who’d never been arrested. No revolving door. No sweetheart plea. No repeat offender any prosecutor could’ve stopped. A child with a gun. And the “soft” prosecutor everybody flogs is the one fighting to try him as an adult. Funny how quiet the room got — a kid with no record fits nobody’s slogan. It points at something harder to fix than a prosecutor.
So before we invite the National Guard the President floats for his “hellhole” cities — Rokita’s already volunteered us for the list — start with the numbers: a city headed the right way faster than most of the country, not one needing an occupation.
Progress is real, some of it homegrown — the curfew, the cameras, the patrols are how a 14-year-old gets caught in days. But the lever nobody wants to pull points at the grown-ups. When a child is wandering downtown with a gun before sunrise, the failure didn’t start that night, or in the prosecutor’s office. It started at a kitchen table.
Here’s the pitch — and before the comments fire up, I’ve been kicking it around for years. The tool’s already in the drawer: the township trustee. Trustees run poor relief, and Indiana law lets them make school attendance a condition of it. So use it. Put parents on notice: if their kid gets hauled in for serious trouble twice, the household’s assistance is on the table. You’ll be amazed how fast things change when parents have skin in the game. Around 2006, with truancy eating Lawrence Township alive, Trustee Mike Hobbs teamed up with Jeff White — then John Marshall’s principal — and tied the help to showing up. The kids showed up. Imagine that.
None of this is a victory lap. One hundred thirty-three isn’t a triumph — it’s 133 funerals, and Brett Scrogham’s is one of them. The shootings are real. The work’s not done. I’m just asking we feel something proportional to the facts — because hollering that the place is on fire while it’s cooling off tells the detectives, interrupters, pastors, and short-handed cops who bent that curve that it didn’t count.
The crime wave you’re scared of is mostly a wave of coverage. The Circle’s still the gem. Let’s act like it.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and a licensed attorney in Indiana and Illinois.
