PUBLICATION: Toronto Star
DATE:
2004.03.13
SECTION:
NEWS
PAGE:
A21
SOURCE:
Toronto Star
BYLINE:
Betsy Powell
DATELINE:
INDIANAPOLIS
ILLUSTRATION:
Perry Reichanadter for
the Toronto Star Confronted with a number of unsolved slayings in the same
neighbourhood, Indianapolis police decided earlier this year to erect half a
dozen billboards showing the faces of the victims. Below, Pastor Byron Alston
takes his 18-foot truck, outfitted with speakers to broadcast anti-violence
messages, to murder scenes. The former convict also runs a youth centre.
Confronted with a number of unsolved slayings in the same neighbourhood,
Indianapolis police decided earlier this year to erect half a dozen billboards
showing the faces of the victims. Below, Pastor Byron Alston takes his 18-foot
truck, outfitted with speakers to broadcast anti-violence messages, to murder
scenes. The former convict also runs a youth centre.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One
city's war against guns; When Indianapolis registered 152 homicides in one year,
police and politicians vowed to act Now murders are down and locals credit a
radical approach to fighting crime, writes Betsy Powell
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
watershed was 1997, the year this Midwestern city's streets were at their
meanest.
By
year's end, 152 people in Marion County- which includes Indianapolis and its
outlying suburbs- were dead, 130 in the city. Hundreds more had been maimed in
shootings, a bloody legacy that can still be seen among many citizens who hobble
along city streets or push themselves in wheelchairs. Most blamed the escalating
violence on crack cocaine, which came to Indianapolis much later than cities on
the coasts.
"The
communities were up in arms over the huge numbers of homicides and law
enforcement was at its wit's end," recalls Melinda Haag, director of the
Marion County Justice Agency.
With
a sense of urgency that will seem familiar to Toronto residents contemplating
this year's spate of shootings, police and politicians pledged to crack down and
reduce the violence.
What
emerged was a criminal justice strategy that zeroes in on the people most likely
to commit, or become the victim of, gun violence. The Indianapolis Violence
Reduction Partnership (IVRP) involves every local, state, federal and criminal
justice agency serving Marion County. It has become a model for other American
cities.
Homicides in 2003 hit a 10-year low for the
Indianapolis Police Department, which investigated 81 killings- the fewest since
1993, continuing what officials hope is a downward trend. Last year, the department posted an 83.5 per cent clearance
rate for homicides at a time when the national average hovers around 64 per
cent. In Toronto last year, police laid charges in just over half of the city's
65 homicides.
Among
the initiatives the IVRP has undertaken:
Once
or twice a month, between 20 and 30 young offenders attend a meeting as a term
of their probation. During these intense "lever-pulling meetings," the
group is bombarded with blunt messages about the consequences of breaking the
law.
United States Attorneys back up the warnings by
"pulling every lever" legally available. Since 2001, the number of
people charged with firearms offences in the southern district of Indiana has
nearly doubled. As part of Project Safe Neighbourhoods, a national strategy
to reduce firearms violence, prosecutors are pursuing stiffer sentences with
a federal law that can hand past offenders caught possessing a firearm or
ammunition a minimum 15-year sentence. For an unlucky few in Indiana, that
has meant major prison time for possessing no more than a bullet.
Twice
monthly probation sweeps involving dozens of officers and agents from the
Indianapolis Police Department, the FBI, ATF, United States Marshals, the
Sheriff's Department, the Marion County Justice Agency and the probation office,
who swoop in for surprise "visits" to high-risk probationers
living in the same geographic area.
Officials say it's also an opportunity to gather intelligence from family,
friends and neighbours about what's happening on the street, while holding
probationers more accountable, something high caseloads make it difficult to do.
Regular
meetings in which district commanders from the Indianapolis Police Department
and homicide detectives compare information about unsolved cases that sometimes
includes the participation of community representatives, such as Lyman Rhodes
from the Indianapolis Commission on African-American Males. It's a chance for
police to paint a picture of crime trends, share intelligence about individual
cases and zero in on potential motives and suspects.
When
investigations aren't progressing, new approaches are encouraged. Confronted
with a handful of unsolved slayings all within a close proximity, police decided
earlier this year to erect half a dozen billboards with the faces of the
victims.
The
program supports and, to some extent, finances, faith-based organizations and
their leaders to provide street-level intervention.
By pulling together every local, state and
federal criminal justice agency, officials say they are sending out a powerful
signal to the core troublemakers- young, male chronic offenders associated with
gangs and criminal networks- that violence won't be tolerated.
The message is aimed at the relatively small
number of criminals who create most of the havoc and are typically undeterred
and scornful of the traditional criminal justice system.
"It's
about communicating to offenders, with potential new defendants, to put the guns
down," says Susan Brooks, United States Attorney for the southern district
of Indiana and a former defence attorney.
"It
is trying to get the young men on the streets to understand what is going to
happen in their lives and the lives of those around them, if they carry guns
illegally, trying to get that message out that they could ... end up doing
serious jail time and that law enforcement is aggressively trying to prosecute
people."
A
videotaped session shows how the "lever-pulling" meetings work.
Shot
from behind a group of offenders seated in the audience section of a courtroom
just before Christmas, it shows prosecutors, probation officers, police and
faith leaders deliver a series of hard-hitting messages. Violence won't be
tolerated. If rules are broken, all "levers" of the law will apply.
Here's what'll happen if you don't.
Jason
Hutchens, IVRP project co-ordinator with the Marion County Justice Agency, opens
the meeting by explaining why there are mug shots taped to the back of some
vacant chairs that were occupied at a previous session. They're dead.
"These
are the people who didn't listen," he says, leaning toward the group.
"Our message didn't get through."
Brooks
follows, tempering the toughness with concern. "What we're here today to do
is ... trying to save your lives and hopefully make an impression of the need to
put the guns down." And, she continues, remember your children, your
mothers and know, "This is about your neighbourhoods."
Prosecutor
Scott Newman adds that despite what the offenders may think, "We don't get
paid by the amount of hides that we tack to the wall in the courtroom of this
county" before explaining why the men were singled out. "You are
either a danger to the community or in danger yourself or both according to what
we know."
Several
black clergymen take the floor and recount their own troubles before God
intervened. Pastor Byron Alston paces back and forth as he recounts how he
turned his life around after emerging from a 16-year prison term for kidnapping
and robbery. Today he runs a youth centre in an area locals call "centre
township" and drives a van decorated with proverbs and outfitted with
speakers from which to broadcast anti-violence messages.
"We
can achieve anything we want," he tells the group. What it took for him, he
continues, was being told he couldn't attend his mother's funeral. "I never
got to say goodbye," he says. And those "stuck on stupid," he
asks to understand, "You can't be a gangster forever."
Some
skeptics question how receptive gang members are to such warnings; many view
dying young as a "calculated risk."
Indianapolis
Police Department Deputy Chief Tim Horty, who often attends the meetings, admits
"some rough characters are in those groups and it's hard to convince them.
But the message is right: If you go back to those neighbourhoods and do the same
thing you were doing before, you're going to get lucky, you're going to go back
to jail or you're going to get killed.
"Some
sit in those chairs and cry. You can tell by their body language that some of
the message is getting out."
The
Indianapolis solution started with a willingness among different law enforcement
agencies to co-operate- and admit they needed help. Haag says co-operation isn't
easy: "It's hard because in essence ... they're admitting failure, they're
admitting weakness ... but that's what they have to be willing to do."
Robert
Bingham, chief probation officer with the Marion Superior Court Probation
Department, agrees that law enforcement agencies traditionally do not
communicate well with each other.
"There
are fiefdoms, turfs that people protect and ... police, probably are more
suspect about this than anybody. There's a term, called the thin blue line,
basically means the police communicate with each other, recreate with each
other, they spend time with each other, probation is the enemy, the public
defenders and corrections are the enemy, that has to break down."
One
of the first things Indianapolis did was to launch a probe into all of the
homicides in 1997, with extensive research and analysis by representatives from
70 different agencies.
"We
presented each case, one at a time. The homicide detectives who had the case
talked about the associates, the crews involved, was there drugs, criminal
histories, went through and coded all the information and got a really good
picture of what was taking place," says Hutchens.
"What we found after a thorough analysis was
that the victims and suspects looked identical," says Hutchens.
About 65 per cent of the victims were African-American males between the ages of
15 and 24, and "most ... were known to law enforcement."
Today,
no one is proclaiming miracles. "We're absolutely not satisfied," says
Brooks. "We've had a decade of 100 homicides in this community. We just had
a young man shot and killed who goes to my church and a traffic road rage
(homicide). They can happen anywhere. We've had eighth graders bringing guns to
school and shooting them in the parking lot."
University
of Ottawa criminologist Irwin Waller says that while he's not familiar with the
Indianapolis situation, the American approach to crime prevention is
"basically law enforcement."
But
"certainly it's a good thing to focus on persistent offenders, which is
what they're really doing," he says.
Waller
believes the more effective approach is to complement such strategies by
"trying to get access to these weapons limited ... and trying to get at why
these particular young adolescent adult males get involved in these situations
and these groups."
Haag,
the original co-ordinator of the IVRP back in 1998, agrees it's not simply
enough "to do great law enforcement." Everyone has to ask, "How
do we abate factors that create criminal environments?" On the law
enforcement side, officials are unanimous in praise of the direction
Indianapolis is taking- though they all say there's more to do.
Horty
says it's not "one particular program that we do that I think that's making
a world of difference, I think a lot of them combined make a big difference.
"What
it does is tell the criminal element out there that Marion County has got its
stuff together, that they are supporting one another and using every arm of the
criminal justice system to help make things better."'It's about
communicating to offenders, with potential new defendants, to put the guns
down.'
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BREITKREUZ'S PLAN TO KEEP GUNS OUT OF THE HANDS OF PEOPLE WHO SHOULDN'T HAVE THEM
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns114.htm