INDIANAPOLIS — The civilian leader of the civilian lead IMPD General Orders Board, which oversees the rules and practices by which Metro police officers do their jobs, told FOX59 News that he is confident that the type of group official misconduct witnessed in the fatal Memphis police beating of a man earlier this month could not happen in Indianapolis.
”I saw several things that I just know as the chairman of the General Orders Board that’s just not the way the police officers are trained,” said Rev. Clyde Posley. “I just know that from the policy and some of the training we had to go through ourselves.”
Memphis PD has disbanded its Scorpion unit to which the officers videotaped in the beating were assigned.
IMPD has several specialty units tasked with seeking out specific violent offenders or focusing on particular crimes and locations but not directed to sweep through neighborhoods simply looking for crime.
”Our expectations of specialty units when they walk out the door is they have a plan and a specific person, location or behavior that they are looking to address,” said Commander Matt Thomas.
IMPD specialty units include Violent Crime Reduction Task Forces at the district level, Violent Crime Units which search for violent offenders and murder suspects, the Covert Robbery Unit which targets a series of robberies or hold-ups tied to specific locations and the Crime Guns Intelligence Center.
”What the research and evidence-based policing tells us is that focusing on specific people, places and behaviors will get you the outcomes that you’re looking for in violent crime reduction and our specialty units use this research as a guide,” said Thomas. ”Our specialty units become very familiar with the social networks involved in violent crime, the places where violent crimes repeatedly happen, the places where we can implement problem-oriented policing solutions, other evidence-based policing solutions.”
Criminal homicides and non-fatal shootings dipped by double-digit amounts last year in Indianapolis and Posley and Thomas agree that IMPD’s specific targeted enforcement strategy and tactics are paying off.
”The task force that we have and the approach to policing that we are seeing is by and large yielding some decrease in violent crime,” said Posley. ”The community wants to help more than we think. They want to assist and want a relationship, in my opinion, with the police department, so they want to see these houses and these events and these drug houses or these sting operations they know in these bad spots and they want them gone because they’re unsafe.”
Thomas said the change in enforcement philosophy has resulted in more community cooperation with law enforcement.
”I think you see many examples of violent crime investigations that would not have been solved had it not been for a call from a community member to start,” he said. “Then that information goes to a specialty unit quite often.”
Thomas said the IMPD Training Academy routinely teaches officers national best practices in regard to Procedural Justice which seeks to carry on a conversation with residents to better understand their encounters with the police that leads to, “policing with the community and not at the community.”