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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowGun violence and homelessness are complicated problems that require more than Band-Aid fixes. But downtown Indianapolis can’t wait for policy changes that never seem to arrive. When you’re bleeding, you take immediate action.
Make no mistake, our center city is bleeding—literally. A weekend shooting and a growing population of people living on the streets call for more than platitudes from politicians and more than grumbling from the private sector.
On Sept. 21, six people were shot near the corner of Maryland and Illinois streets after a fight between two groups of minors led to gunfire just before 11:30 p.m. Such incidents are infrequent downtown, but they shouldn’t happen at all.
Meanwhile, another downtown problem is painfully obvious every day: a booming population of panhandlers and homeless on the streets. Whether they’re homeless and sleeping quietly or aggressively panhandling matters little to passersby. Residents, workers and visitors shouldn’t be confronted by these folks—or the waste they leave behind.
In another time, what’s happening would have been so alarming that the city’s political and business leadership would have come together in a visible way to find workable solutions.
But the response to last weekend’s downtown violence has been underwhelming. Republican mayoral candidate Jim Merritt predictably laid the blame on Mayor Joe Hogsett, prompting the mayor’s campaign spokesperson to issue a statement about the root causes of violence. One wonders if we would have heard from the mayor’s camp at all if it weren’t an election year.
Among the problems we all face in confronting these challenges is the riskiness in 2019 of saying anything that might offend or convey a lack of compassion. The parents of teenagers who are out on the streets unsupervised late at night are clearly in over their heads, but it’s politically unwise to call them out. Or, apparently, to figure out a way to have and enforce reasonable curfew laws. It’s maddening that children as young as 15 are legally able to roam the streets until 1 a.m. on weekend nights.
And we’re all for treating people on the streets with compassion. But there’s nothing compassionate about a society that allows them to sleep and/or relieve themselves on the streets.
Hogsett and other elected officials have proposed solutions and funding to fight homelessness and panhandling, but all the general public sees is a problem getting worse. A group of local government and business officials recently traveled to San Antonio to learn how it’s dealing with the problem. We hope the best ideas from that trip can be quickly disseminated and implemented.
As for the lack of cleanliness that comes with people living on the streets, Downtown Indy Inc. should revisit its failed attempt to create an economic improvement district in the city’s core. That effort to raise $3 million a year from downtown property owners was effectively killed by downtown apartment owners in early 2018, but the money it would have raised for homeless outreach and keeping our streets clean is desperately needed.
Between gun-toting minors and people sleeping on our sidewalks, we’re stuck with serious safety issues that imperil the future of our downtown. Leaders must do more than work behind the scenes to solve it.•
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While the challenge is no doubt more widespread, a few street corners seem to be particular magnets for the homeless and/or panhandlers … mainly on Illinois intersecting with Washington and again at Maryland.
As for the “gun-toting minors” this past weekend’s encounter seems like an aberration, not a recurring pattern.
While minors downtown carrying guns is not a “recurring pattern,” it has happened before, more than once, and if nothing is done, it will happen again. There’s no excuse for minors to be on downtown streets after 11 p.m. Curfew them–if they’re spotted downtown after 11, take them to the juvenile detention center and their parents/guardians can pick them up there. If they’re running from the police downtown after 11, they probably have something to hide. The homeless issue is complicated–these citizens need compassion, counseling, a ray of hope. But the kids downtown need to know they’re not welcome after 11. Sorry, but that’s life.
You are right I live downtown and walk early in the morning and at night with my dog and find they also having sex out in public thinking no one would see them. I think it is ironic I get yelled at when my dog goes to the bathroom and I bag it. Maybe we should give bags and toilet paper for them. I see them at the church on Deleware Saturdays fighting over clothing to discard it in the bushes. I have almost stepped in human poop on the sidewalks. I have even seen a homeless man pull out his privates and pee in front of clients at a restaurant laughing. Then a girl at Starbucks pulled her pants down peed through the chair and pulled her pants up and walked away.
It is a crying shame and I have met 3 business owners that are leaving downtown and one told me he is leaving Indiana.
It is a shame they want to be like other great states but takes taxpayers money instead of some of the businesses paying for the transit of there workers downtown.
IMPD officers tell us at neighborhood meetings that they are hamstrung by the “Homeless Bill of Rights”, which the City-County Council passed in 2015. Let’s start by repealing this measure, which has been a key component of the awful mess we see on our downtown sidewalks. Surely a handful of Democrats on the council care enough about our downtown’s success to join with their Republican counterparts (the original bill was passed largely along party lines) and make this fix.
Greed and lack of compassion by our current Mayor who would rather give our tax money to the well heeled. This clown is corrupt as is a portion of the City County Council.