City, feds teaming up: Indianapolis, US Southern District planning partnership on guns

A partnership between the city of Indianapolis and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana is still in its early stages but will ultimately be designed to address gun crimes throughout the Circle City.

Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett and Indiana Southern District U.S. Attorney Zachary Myers are working together to hire three city attorneys who will work in Myers’ office and focus on gun crimes in Indianapolis.

“I think of the impact that federal prosecution is able to have on the violent crime problem in Indianapolis and I’m really excited and grateful to be able to partner with the city in order to get that done,” Myers said.

The pair has been talking about the partnership since last fall and are now seeing their idea really start to come together.

But first, the City-County Council has to approve the proposal before the hiring can begin.

Committee meeting

On June 13, the council’s Administration and Finance Committee met to hear a presentation from the city and vote on the proposal.

The committee ultimately approved the proposal to add an additional appropriation of $225,000 in the 2023 budget of the Office of Corporation Counsel.

The proposal now heads to the full council for consideration at its July 10 meeting.

“We believe that as we continue to look to be more strategic and more focused, this being in our toolbox only enhances our ability to make our community safe,” Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Deputy Chief Kendale Adams said during the June 13 presentation.

The committee questioned whether the partnership is about picking up where it’s perceived that Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears has left off.

Corporation Counsel Matt Giffin said the proposed partnership has nothing to do with Mears, saying instead that it involves a difference in state and federal law.

“There’s more than enough work to go around for prosecutors,” Giffin said. “Both levels of government and federal crimes are different than state crimes to work in the federal prosecutors differently,” Giffin said. “The nature of this work in the federal system is you’ve developed the case from the ground up for investigation and then prosecution, so they don’t get served them on a plate by anybody, law enforcement or otherwise. They work them up, sort of suited up at the beginning.

“I would like to emphasize again, this proposal does not in any way detract from what the Marion County prosecutor is doing,” he continued. “And it’s really independent of that.”

For his part, Hogsett gave a passionate speech to the committee explaining his reasoning for the plan. He noted that he once held Myers’ position.

“It’s the tools that a federal prosecutor has available to him or her that differentiate the federal system from the state system. Federal charges will usually result in bad actors being taken off the street throughout the entire pretrial period,” Hogsett said. “I ask for your support this evening as we work to strengthen the tools available to our local police and help make the streets safer for our officers and residents alike.”

Giffin explained that the reason they are only asking for $225,000 is because the year is already halfway through. But for future budgets, he said, they plan to ask for more.

Plan in action

Under the proposed partnership, the three city attorneys would be paid by the city and report to the city’s Office of Corporation Counsel, but work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Their official titles would be special assistant U.S. attorneys.

Because they would be working with the Office of Corporation Counsel, they would have to be residents of Marion County.

“Having three additional prosecutors that we’re able to dedicate just to that is going to make a significant difference,” Myers said.

Myers noted that the Indiana Southern District covers about 4.2 million people, with Indianapolis alone having almost 900,000 people.

“Hopefully we are getting more people who say, ‘That sounds good to me, sign me up,’ showing interest in taking this position, because we can’t do it,” he said. “And we’re like any law firm — you can get desks, computers, pens; you can get that anywhere. What a law firm really is, is its people, and getting people in to fill these important positions and to help us in this expansion in the office is one of the most critical things facing us as an office.”

The difference in when the federal government prosecutes compared to the city would be fewer trials and no bail. Under the Federal Bail Reform Act, federal defendants who are awaiting trial and are considered a flight risk or a danger to the community are held in custody.

Also, if a group of people commit a violent gun crime, each individual defendant stands trial in state court, versus on trial in federal court.

“I think people are excited,” Myers said. “I know our partners in law enforcement are excited because they’re the ones who have some of these investigations and some of these cases that would be good to bring here that we’re not able to, and they look forward to being able to partner with us.”

Myers also noted that the partnership isn’t unique, as other states have put similar programs in place.

Defense perspective

Monica Foster, chief federal defender at Indiana Federal Community Defenders, said she will be keeping an eye on the partnership.

“The current U.S. attorney is a fair broker. He has told me that we are not returning to the way things were in the past administration and the prosecution,” Foster said. “I believe him, but I am watching it very carefully.”

According to Foster, the previous administration tried to enact a similar partnership Project Safe Neighborhoods, which was designed to curb the gun violence in the city. But, she said, the result was the targeting of minorities.

While the Indiana Southern District demographic is primarily white, Foster said the majority of the prosecutions under Project Safe Neighborhoods were of minorities.

“And yet the gun prosecutions were almost 70% minority folks. You cannot tell me that it is just minority folks that are causing gun violence in our neighborhoods. I know that that is just simply not true,” she said.

Foster added that more is needed to reduce gun violence in the city than simply putting people behind bars. She gave examples including creating jobs and better ways for people to get to those jobs.

“I just don’t think this is a criminal justice problem. I think we need to be thinking more creatively about solutions to it because we’ve tried solving it with the current criminal justice system in the past, and it just hasn’t worked,” she said. “If we were focused more on job training, job skills, creating ways to get people from where they live to where the jobs are, I think that that would solve this problem more than more than making these unholy alliances between the city and the feds and asking the feds to solve the city’s problems.”

As far as the Southern District partnering with other cities, Myers said, “Stay tuned.”•