Capital Crimes
What you say if I asked you to name a capital where people are shot dead everyday and the government can’t quite seem to get a handle on things? What you say? Baghdad? No, the answer is Indianapolis.
There have been six murders in the past 24 hours. And 10 total murders in the past four days. Indy could go through August 10 without another murder and still have a murder for everyday of the month.
City officials remain determined to win the war on crime, but I wonder if this one of those times when the best hope is containment not victory. Back in May I wrote about the disturbing trend in rising crime. I saw stats that showed crime rising in January and February. I was scary because if there were two months where homicides should have dropped, were those two. I figured if crime was going to be that bad in the winter, God only knows how bad it was going to be this summer. Now we know.
The homicide rate (88-92 depending on how you do the math) hasn’t been this bad since 1998.
The only thing more frightening than the crimes that get reported are the ones that do not. A doctor is carjacked and shot in the parking lot of his hospital. A young man is beaten to a bloody pulp on the canal. Another person is robbed at gunpoint for their backpack. These are crimes you don’t hear about because they don’t make the news. But they are symptomatic of a much larger problem.
Crime is out of control. Our public officials are scrambling to deal with the problem. It is only going to get worse before it gets better. I hear Baghdad is nice this time of year. You don’t even have to go out to get bombed.
