How Indianapolis Significantly Cut Homicides

In 2021, Indianapolis was facing one of the highest homicide spikes in the nation. By 2024, the city had reduced criminal homicides by an astounding 54%. 

Smart Justice travels to Indiana to explore a bold new strategy that’s transforming how cities tackle gun violence. Known as Indy Peace, the city’s violence reduction model is a three-pronged approach built on intervention, prevention, and neighborhood stabilization—and it’s getting national attention.

How can this help other communities? It's a roadmap that’s not cookie-cutter, but replicable—with the right leadership, resources, and patience.

Chapters

• 0:00 Gun Violence as a Solvable Problem
• 1:30 Indianapolis' Three-Pillar Violence Reduction Strategy
• 4:14 Building Relationships and Changing Mindsets
• 6:45 Meeting People Where They Are
• 10:09 Results and Misconceptions
• 14:00 Sustainability and Implementation Advice
• 19:41 Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Gun violence isn't just a crime problem. It's a community problem. It's a public health problem, but with the right strategy it's also a solvable problem. Around the nation, gun violence is destroying families and weakening communities, and it's becoming a leading cause of death for young people. We know that in nearly every city, only a small number of people are driving most of the violence. An approach called group violence intervention, or GVI, identifies those individuals and engages with them directly, trying to offer them a way out before the violence occurs. It's not just about stopping the shootings. It's about building a community where everyone feels like they have a shot at hope. In this episode, we're headed to Indianapolis, a city that saw one of the nation's highest homicide spikes during COVID, and then they decided to do something different. They wanted to not only stop shootings but truly change lives.

Speaker 2: 1:01

The story of Indianapolis' gun violence reduction strategy begins not with a single program, but with a city asking tough questions Indianapolis' gun violence reduction strategy that we have here in the city originated from individuals here in the city that saw what Oakland, california, did with their GVRS strategy with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, and so when they saw that they brought them here to kind of see what the city was like. We were seeing really high criminal homicide rates. At that time it was, hey, we need this in our city to help lower gun violence, help save our community members in the city.

Speaker 1: 1:45

The consultants stayed for two years interviewing detectives, gathering data and asking a crucial question who is driving the violence?

Speaker 2: 1:54

And then they also were able to look at and go through the cases and see that roughly 200 to 300 people are the ones really causing the violence in the city. And that's where we brought, that's where they brought in that strategy of how do we focus in on those individuals and then provide those individuals with either the services to change their lives around, change their mindset around, or focus enforcement from law enforcement.

Speaker 1: 2:21

The city committed $150 million over three years. The result a strategy with three pillars intervention, prevention and stabilization.

Speaker 2: 2:32

Violence, intervention and that kind of work with the individuals that are causing the violence in the city right to address the immediate need which is lowering our violence in the city. A lot of the work that we do when it comes to the intervention work right, we get a lot of our referral. I would say probably 80 to 90 percent of our referrals that we get that we should work with come from law enforcement right. That's a partnership that you know everybody thinks is a hard partnership to have, but it's a partnership you need. You need the law enforcement agencies to know the work you're doing, know that their work is still important, that they're doing, but know that the individuals that they keep arresting every year, every other month, actually probably need services and somebody to try and work with them and work on the services part of it. They're still going to be there. They're still going to have to do enforcement on individuals that truly are causing the gun violence in the city.

Speaker 2: 3:26

But if I can take five people from from law enforcement and say, hey, we're going to work on them, give me 12 to 18 months to work with these individuals. Let me give them cognitive behavioral therapy, intensive life coaching, barriers help them with barriers, help them with services. In 18 months my goal is to take them away from the list that our law enforcement people have and say these people you don't have to worry about. Then we think about the prevention piece, which is another piece of the violence reduction strategy. The prevention piece is a longer term situation, and then the third piece is farther down the road is then community andterm situation, and then the third piece that's farther down the road is then community and neighborhood stabilization. And how do we get our community to stabilize and be one and keep working through this whole process?

Speaker 1: 4:14

Ralph Durant was brought on to lead the youth violence prevention work. His approach Start with relationships.

Speaker 3: 4:20

Through relationships we're able to develop and build people so that violent acts are not necessarily the first thing that they do. We're not just talking about just an individual who was just killed. We're also talking about a lost opportunity, of a life worn and also a whole reverberation through the community, whether that's direct people who knew, raising their expectations and understanding them and really letting them understand that they are the solution oftentimes to many of our issues. As you know, we want to place a lot of burden and expectation on systems when we know that systems are our beast. Ultimately, what I believe are the root issues is going to be cultural and environmental factors, and once you start to dive into those spaces, that's where we'll start to really see the nuances of what's causing the mindsets, because violence is this thing where people think that we need to just focus on violence. We're just focusing on violence. We're missing the cart for the horse at this point in time and we're really needing to identify the circumstances and the mindsets that leads to a person committing these acts.

Speaker 3: 5:49

There is this theory that I have about helping, fixing and serving. Helping is that I just provide you with a fish today and you need a fish tomorrow. I'll keep providing you this fish. Fixing is I'm coming from a hierarchy position where you got something wrong with you. I know the solution. I'm at a higher space than you. I can fix you, but that creates a level of resentment at a certain point. I believe in serving, and serving is where you're going to be able to walk through life of people, through the process, and understand that we all are living a human experience.

Speaker 2: 6:20

We're bringing in then Ralph and this prevention piece to really focus in on. How do we bring community organizations together to really address our youth? How do we bring everybody together that are already doing stuff with our youth and working as a community to do that?

Speaker 1: 6:34

If there's one message that Ralph and Tony come back to again and again, it's this Gun violence isn't just about guns, it's about mindset, environment and opportunity.

Speaker 3: 6:45

You must meet people exactly where they are, that's mentally, that's physically, that's socially, that's spiritually, economically, educationally. And if we're able to identify the mindset, then we're able to work with the person individually and not give them cookie cutter programming or services, but specifically dive into their particular needs as individuals through that interpersonal relationship and be able to help them identify themselves as an asset, to be able to identify and see themselves and change not change their personalities, but change their perspective of the way they not only see the world but how they see themselves existing within the world. Life is really no different than a video game in many ways, where you got to understand the rules in order to get to the next level. So what we're trying to do here is get people to move from level one to two, to three and four, but also recognize there are going to be pitfalls in life to where they may go back to two or three, but they'll never get back to one, based off the service that we're going to be able to provide them.

Speaker 2: 7:41

And be ready to meet people on many different levels too. Right, like you think of a strategy, there's going to be a cookie cutter. This is the layout, the bones of the structure, but you got to be ready to know what you have to do and move in different spaces and different ways for every single person, not every single person that we meet just because they're doing the same thing that the other person is doing or the other person is doing. They're all in different levels or stages of their lives and they need different kind of attention. When, when we work with our violence interrupters and our life coaches and our outreach workers, they understand, when they're out in the community, that they know how to interact with individuals and then know how to adjust to keep interacting with that individual to show that they're there to support them, versus just staying by the book it doesn't work every time kind of thing.

Speaker 3: 8:38

And I'll also add to what Tony is saying too, though. So, like, a lot of the work is not just at the micro level, which is the interpersonal level, it's also at the mezzo, and it's also at the macro level. And to be at the mezzo level, this is our institutions and our organizations, and giving them the understanding that providing services is just the baseline, that we have to go deeper than just providing a service, because if we're just providing a service, we are essentially subsidizing their lifestyle in order for them to kind of stay exactly where they are. So it's bringing that type of understanding, intentionality, when working with the institutions, the organizations, for them to recognize that it's great to provide a service, but we have to go beyond that.

Speaker 3: 9:18

And then, on the macro level, that's when you get into systems, that's when you get into dealing with politicians and lawmakers and things of that nature. And once we get to that level, that's when you have to be able to break down the understanding for them to be able to. When they're making decisions in the legislature, are politicians making the decision based off a district that is coming from a very intentional and knowledgeable space? Because we have to evolve at some point away from just saying hey, I recognize there's a gap here and we're just going to fill this gap. I say that we must get to the foundation of where the issue is and build back up, so the gap doesn't necessarily need to be filled. The gap is removed.

Speaker 1: 10:02

Indianapolis is now a model, but the leaders behind it don't sugarcoat the challenges.

Speaker 2: 10:09

Didn't have this in 2021. We started in 2022. We're at, I think, a 54% decrease in criminal homicides in the city. That's crazy, right, but it's amazing and it's those kinds of things that we want to see. But that's three years down the road. Right, the goal was 10%. Every year, we saw over 10%. The first year, we saw over 10%. The second year, we were stagnant. The third year and now we're we're still, but we're still seeing great numbers happening. Um and so, if cities bring this, this kind of thing, in trust the process, be patient and support it and continue to support it. Don't just let it go after a year or so.

Speaker 3: 10:57

This work is tough, oh yeah, it's tough. It's tough because it's a 24-7 type of gig, so it's a process. So you've got to be able to develop a right culture, and culture is top-down, which starts with leadership. Leadership has to be in it for the right reasons.

Speaker 2: 11:14

So there are always going to be misconceptions. We're hiring felons to do this work. We're paying felons to do it misconceptions we're hiring felons to do this work we're paying felons to do. Well? No, we're paying community members to do work that they're passionate about, which is saving other community members of their community and and and trying to change lives. Right, that's what we do, right, um, and we're helping individuals like our fellows.

Speaker 2: 11:39

Right, we're helping our fellows change their lives around, incentivizing them on hitting milestones that they may never have hit on their own, that they have somebody following them and working with them.

Speaker 2: 11:53

And as they're hitting these milestones, yes, they're probably going through a court case. Yes, they're probably on probation. Yes, we're incentivizing them and giving them money for doing that kind of stuff. But it's that positive reinforcement, it's that support that they get from their life coach, from their violence interrupter that originally met them, from their outreach worker, that allows them to move from this piece of being somebody that was at very high risk of being a perpetrator or a victim and or a victim of gun violence, into a community member out in the community, full time job, buying their own house, having a kid. They would never have thought they. They would never have thought about that. Right, that's the work we do and that's how we see the differences that we're making in the city, and we just hope that everybody else starts seeing it, I would say a misconception is is that you know, from a prevention perspective, that our main and only focus is on high-risk individuals.

Speaker 3: 12:56

I believe that there is an invisible group of people who are walking around the city of Indianapolis who are one or two missed paychecks away from doing something that they normally wouldn't do. So, from a prevention perspective, my mind isn't always just solely fixed on the super high risk individuals, but it's also the ones who are just barely making it. So, yeah, I would say that there's a shift in mindset in some of the young people that I've been engaging with, but I would say, most importantly, the mind shift must change with the adults that are also in our lives as well, because we can work with kids all day long, but if you're not impacting their environments and the culture and the people who are in their lives every day, you're not really going to have a real, full, full impact on these young people, because I could be teaching them conflict resolution, emotional intelligence and emotional regulation, but if none of that exists anywhere else, then it gets lost in translation the youth are the ones that we need to listen to what they want.

Speaker 2: 13:59

We need to hear them, we need to have them be the ones up talking about youth violence, youth gun violence. I can talk about youth gun violence all the time. He can talk about it all the time. It's the youth that want to see a change. That are the ones that people need to push up and elevate to be the ones talking about it.

Speaker 2: 14:19

My grandpa was in the church. I grew up in the church and it was serving the people. It was loving on anybody and everybody in the community and giving back to them, and for me it was seeing how happy people were when they realized that they had the support of somebody, to have somebody really push to help them. That's really what pushed me into the work. And then I just so happened to somebody I worked with or worked alongside, pulled me into the city and started me in this work and then, yeah, I hit the ground running with this work. This was truly even more uplifting because I'm still working with a population of individuals that a lot of them are re-entry, a lot of them are coming back into the society and into our community and I want them to stay in the community. I want them to have the opportunity at one point in time to be somebody else that they haven't been yet in this community and I don't want to keep varying people I've seen before. So this is a process. It's not a quick fix. Right, law enforcement can arrest people and it looks like it's a quick fix, but three, four months down the road, somebody else is moving in there and they're going to start doing the same thing. When we think of like, a, like a toolkit or a, you know, a play by play book, um, I wish we had one.

Speaker 2: 15:39

Three years ago, when we started this, we had the actual organization here to try and help us through the program and kind of guide us in in how to get it going. And, like I said you, you you have the bones of it and the structure, um, but each city is going to be doing something differently. Um, some cities do only certain areas, whereas our, you know, we do the whole city on the whole County. Um, every city is a little different. Uh, the national Institute for criminal justice reform. We call them Nick Jr. They're going to be mad at me for saying that they have an organization called the National Office of Violence Prevention Network and through them they have them and several other organizations put together an Office of Violence Prevention Toolkit that just came out, and so cities can look at that and get an idea of how do you name your office. Right, we just happened to be the Office of Public Health and Safety when we started and then we just kind of grew our piece of that into that division of our city. But they have a toolkit for that.

Speaker 2: 16:42

But again, it's not cookie cutter, right, you can't just throw it out there and just go. You have to adapt to your city. And so when I think about hiring individuals to do the work, especially when we're talking about being in the city and doing the work, for me it's focusing on people that are from here. Right, I'm born and raised in Indianapolis. I don't plan on leaving here anytime soon. I love this city and that's the kind of people we look for Right of this city.

Speaker 2: 17:10

And that's the kind of people we look for right, we look for individuals that know this city, that have been around this city long enough that they know the ins and outs of what's going on in the city. They can get the temperature of the city and understand hey, I need to go over on this side of town or I need to be over here doing this kind of work. And then also individuals that have the lived experience right, the individuals that have the lived experience in many different ways too. A lot of people automatically think that means that they're formally justice involved and things like that. But not even those individuals Right.

Speaker 2: 17:42

Anybody has been in the city understanding and seeing the hurt, the barriers that everybody faces and facing them themselves and how to get through that and how to build, facing them themselves and how to get through that and how to build. And then from their successes, how do you then move in the space where you're encouraging somebody else to grow and build and change your mindset around? We kind of hit the ground running and built the plane while we were flying, and I do not suggest doing that, but learn from, learn from other cities, see what other cities are doing. Get an idea for what you want, have an idea for what kind of money you have to do it as well. Build it out, have it ready and then go forward from there. And then if you need help, you know, reach out. I'm a phone call away.

Speaker 2: 18:30

I talk to cities across the nation. I've gone and talked at conferences to mayors about the work we're doing and the ups and downs and the benefits of it and then how to explain the benefits of it as well. So, yeah, we're just right here. We happen to have something unique to the nation Most offices of violence prevention or offices of public health and safety, mayor's offices and neighborhood safety engagement all these different names, right, that you're going to hear throughout the nation. But we, for our gun violence reduction strategy, for the community-based approach to it, we partner in partnership with a foundation, the Indy Public Safety Foundation, and together we have a nonprofit organization, government agency that work together to build out then what we call IndyPeace, and it's the program when it comes to intervention work. So it's interesting stuff we have here.

Speaker 1: 19:32

In the next episode of A Shot at Hope, we'll take a look at community-based solutions and one of the most dangerous zip codes in Little Rock.

Speaker 4: 19:40

When young people particularly find that security and that initial sense of significance that my life matters, my life can have worth and meaning, then of course, from there you know you build on that. And of significance that my life matters, my life can have worth and meaning, then of course, from there you know you build on that and of course that takes people down a path that's moving away from violence, a path from screaming and crying out to be noticed, to be found, listen to A Shot at Hope on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or go to smartjusticeorg.