Indianapolis marks 5 years since downtown riots

INDIANAPOLIS - It was five years ago this weekend that downtown Indy was a landscape of flames, tear gas and broken windows as the local response of social injustice protests that erupted into riots and looting all across America.




"I think that moment in time was incredibly difficult for downtown," said Taylor Schaffer, current President & CEO of Downtown Indy Inc., but at the time a key aide to Mayor Joe Hogsett. "It was a difficult time for everyone."




None more so than Metro police.




"This is my city," said IMPD Chief Chris Bailey, a member of then-Chief Randy Taylor's command staff. "Its where I grew up and it was heartbreaking especially when I drove through downtown Indianapolis on Saturday morning."




That morning, Indianapolis was only one-third of the way through its Days of Rage which would result in more than 100 arrests, $15 million in property losses and public costs and two men shot to death.

What began on Friday afternoon, May 29, 2020, as peaceful if noisy protests on Monument Circle decrying the Minneapolis Police murder of George Floyd 590 miles away and the fatal and ultimately justified IMPD officer involved shooting of Dreasjon Reed three weeks before, devolved into chaos and mass looting that stripped downtown stores of shoes, jewelry, cell phones, copying equipment and clothes off the racks, resulting in the destruction of machinery that shop owners needed to make a living and shattered windows on businesses, hotels and restaurants.




"The looting is something we should never succumb to," said Greg Meriweather, a community consultant, "but I think a lot of people take advantage of those situations and when it all goes down, its hard to stop once it gets moving.




"It was really wild seeing Indianapolis like that," he said. "I wasn't surprised so much. It was like a powder keg just waiting to boil over to the degree where people finally had enough."




Indianapolis, and other major American cities also rocked by violence, were already on the back foot in the spring of 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, which emptied downtown office buildings, cancelled tourism, conventions and events and resulted in a sense of wary isolation as authorities attempted to understand and then explain how a once-in-a-century virus infected and eventually took the lives of 1.2 million people in the United States.




"Global pandemic, everything shut down, people are angry, they're scared, they don't know what's going on, George Floyd is murdered in Minneapolis, we have our own officer involved incidents that are occurring here, racial reformation across the country, demands for change in policing, and all of that came together at the same time," remembered Bailey. "I don't know that you could replicate that if you tried, and I wouldn't want to exist in a world where it happened again."




Over the course of three nights, as the sun went down, the streets came alive with firebombs, gunfire and vandalism.




"Our cops were outnumbered, they were overwhelmed, they did the absolutely best that they could in the time that they had," said Bailey who has a photograph on his desk of IMPD's commanders on that first night, in secure room and seemingly paralyzed by the unprecedented challenge their officers were facing out on the streets. "I keep it there as a memory of that chaos, listening on the radio as our cops faced fire bombings and assaults and our neighbors were shot and businesses were destroyed and feeling a little bit helpless, not being able to do anything from that room in that moment to help them."

By the second night, Mayor Hogsett thought his office had come to an agreement with the protesters to disperse by 7 p.m. without a curfew or tougher marching orders for police.




The mayor's faith in the promises of protest leaders hadn't accounted for the rioters who had no interest in abiding by the rules or commitments of others.




"We, and I mean the administration, not our officers, could have done some things better and different," said Bailey.




A report by a hand-picked Hogsett commission charged with reviewing only police and not the City and the mayor's entire response found fault with IMPD training and planning.




"When the odds are against them and they do everything right, there are still people who point the finger at them and say, 'You did it wrong, you could have done it better and you should have done this and you should have done that,' from the comfort of their home," said Bailey who, over the course of five years, led IMPD's response to the recommendations and internal adjustments. "We've changed our policies. We've changed our training. We've updated our equipment. We looked at tactics because its been looked at over and over again."








While the downtown workforce is continuing to rebound from the COVID office shutdown, the convention and tourism trade has returned to 2019 levels.




A new convention headquarters hotel is being constructed and Indianapolis has since hosted an entire NCAA Tournament, the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials and the NBA All Star Game.




Stores have restocked their shelves and reopened.




New restaurants have taken over abandoned locations.




More apartments are being built.




"I think there is a greater level of communication with downtown stakeholders, the public safety operations and public safety response, there was a lot of critical thought given to how all parties could handle major events better," said Schaffer.




Where progress and momentum has been lost, said Meriweather, a former IMPD community liaison, is in the trust of the citizenry, which had a tenuous relationship with the City and police before the riots.




"I think there was a loss of trust at one point and I think we've regained some trust and now I think we're losing it again," he said. "I think at this point we have to get to a point of getting the dissenters to the table, the people who will actually speak the truth, and stop being afraid of those voices.




"The outcomes to me were not the outcomes I was looking for. I was looking for change in legislation, change in the rules, a lot of things with police reform," said Meriweather. "I didn't see what I wanted us to see. I didn't want to see us painting murals on Indiana Avenue. I wanted to see some major change take place from that incident."

In the wake of the riots, Hogsett and former Chief Taylor opened up IMPD's rulemaking and oversight boards to more civilian participation.




The Defund the Police movement never really took hold in Indianapolis.




"We have more civilian oversight than any other department that I know," said Bailey. "I think I have mixed feelings about the boards. I think some of them work very effectively and I think others frankly just don't."




Five years later, as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion plans are being scrapped across the country, Meriweather has doubts about the lasting positive impact of the spring of 2020 unrest in Indy.




"I think the tide has totally turned and changed to a degree where a lot of the DEI things have been rolled back or rolled away completely," he said. "You've seen a lot of things happen where things are now being defunded that were about DEI. It seems as if the DEI thing was a pacifier in the first place and all of a sudden when things got back calm or changing administration, you found that people never really wanted it in the first place."




As the city, citizenry and metro police move forward, community listening sessions are planned throughout the month of June. Click here for details on how to attend these sessions.





via: https://fox59.com/news/indycrime/indianapolis-marks-5-years-since-downtown-riots/