Indianapolis and its Feeble Attempts at Police Reform

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The Life of Reason
~ George Santayana (1905)

Once again, Indianapolis and its police department have come to a fork in the road and must choose a direction. The roads are obscured as they disappear over the horizon. One path will lead residents to a future of mutual trust and congenial relationships. The other path leads to more turmoil, chaos, and police violence. Indianapolis has been here before, and the residents of the city continue to deal with the outcomes of previous political bargains cut in smoke-filled backrooms.

In March 1876, just before the May Primary Elections, three white Indianapolis police officers shot an unarmed African American man in the back as he ran away from them. The killing and lack of action by city and county leaders caused an uproar in Indianapolis’s African American community as well as in parts of the larger white community. Reluctantly, the county held two of the officers for trial on murder charges, but they were found not guilty by an all-white jury.

In a last-minute effort to save local republican’s political fortunes at the polls, the mayor, John T. Caven (R), made a deal with the black community, led by the ministers of Bethel A.M.E. and Allen Chapel A.M.E. Churches. In exchange for Black votes, Caven promised to employ Indianapolis’s first black policemen and firemen, who would work exclusively in the city’s black neighborhoods. That deal kept the Indianapolis police and fire departments segregated for nearly 100-years.

In 1981, after numerous police shootings of unarmed African Americans the mayor of Indianapolis, William H. Hudnut, formed the 25 member Tanselle-Adams Commission (led by Donald Tanselle a local banker, and Lehman Adams, an African American dentist) to examine the high number of police killings and to make recommendations for improvements. A key recommendation of this commission, a civilian review board, was not fully implemented, as Hudnut noted in his memoir The Hudnut Years, 1976-1991. “It did not have as much authority as some people in the community wanted (for example, it had no power to review police-action shootings that ended in fatalities, because those were to be considered by a grand jury; nor was it a civilian review board)…” Behind closed doors, the mayor and his hand-picked political commission settled on half measures and hollow promises of change.

Today, nearly 40-years after the Tanselle-Adams Commission Report was made public, and one hundred forty-four years after leaders of the Black community traded their collective votes for patronage jobs, Indianapolis and its police department again face the same issue, police officers shooting unarmed African Americans. Now, Indianapolis mayor, Joe Hogsett, and the city-county council will bring in the New York University School of Law Criminal Justice Lab (NYU) to review the situation and make recommendations for changes in policing. NYU will collect data and present a report that will confirm facts about the long ugly history of police violence already known by many in Indianapolis. However, unless Mayor Hogsett is prepared to make the hard choices necessary, choices that will not endear him to many police officers nor many city elites—NOTHING will change, Indianapolis seems not to remember its past; thus, it will inevitably repeat its past missteps.

Leon E. Bates is an Urban Historian of the late 19th and early 20th century whose research focuses on issues of education, health care, labor, government, violence, police violence, and the intersection of race in the United States. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Pan African Studies from the University of Louisville. Leon lives in Indianapolis with his wife and family, where he remains politically and socially engaged. Until 2007, when the U.S. economy failed and crushed the construction industry, he owned and operated a commercial and industrial electrical contracting firm.