Four Indianapolis police officers were indicted Friday by a grand jury investigating an incident in which off-duty members of the city’s emergency Mobile Field Force allegedly harassed and beat men and women while partying in a busy downtown entertainment district.
The Aug. 27 incident, known as the “policemen’s brawl,” is one in a series of bizarre and brazen incidents by city police officers. Critics say they are undisciplined, arrogant and dangerous to the very public health that they are sworn to protect.
Other incidents cited by those critics:
– In April, a nine-year veteran of the Indianapolis Police Department was forced to resign and then indicted on nine felony charges of bribery, sexual battery and sexual misconduct after at least five women complained that he had threatened to arrest them if they didn’t have sex with him. He had used his patrol car computer to get their names, addresses and phone numbers after noting their license plates.
– In March, a city police officer was arrested after a 15-mile chase by an Indiana state trooper. He was stopped for driving more than 100 m.p.h. on an interstate highway through town. The officer was hurrying because he was late for a training session with his police dog. The state trooper handcuffed him, but when other city police arrived, they removed the cuffs.
– Also in March, an Indianapolis police officer was demoted after he was videotaped at a Sovereign Patriots militia meeting in his police uniform. On the videotape aired by a local television station, the police officer referred disparagingly to Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who is Jewish, as “Goldstein,” and boasted that he did not believe in enforcing laws requiring seat belts or motorcycle helmets.
Many, but not all, of the complaints about abusive city police behavior have come from black civilians and black city police officers, who say an “old boy” network has protected the city’s white police officers and bred arrogance.
“I was in the police department the other day and a veteran officer, a white officer, pulled me aside and said that he was embarrassed by what is happening, that there are officers who think they have carte blanche to do anything they want to do and if they aren’t stopped the whole department will go to hell in a handbasket,” said Lionel T. Rush, a minister and member of Concerned Clergy, which has led repeated demonstrations against the police department in recent weeks.
The demonstrations are a response to not only the incidents listed above, but to a long history of abusive police behavior in the city’s black neighborhoods, according to Rush and other critics.
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They noted that city officials and others are only addressing the issue of police misbehavior now because the “policemen’s brawl” occurred in the downtown area in front of at least 50 witnesses, both black and white.
“The incident downtown is a manifestation of the serious lack of discipline and accountability in our police department,” said Roderick Bohannan, president of the NAACP chapter in Indianapolis.
On Aug. 27, at least 17 off-duty city police officers watched a minor league baseball game in the mayor’s box at Victory Stadium with their police chief, Donald E. Christ.
A group of the officers, but not Christ, then left the stadium and went to a downtown bar. About 11 p.m., a large group of them left the bar and began parading down Meridian Street in heavy traffic, harassing women and taunting men on the sidewalk and in vehicles, according to police reports.
Witnesses, including a minister and construction workers on a job site, reported that several of the officers grabbed themselves in the genital area while making lewd comments to women, a police report said.
Others among the off-duty officers reportedly brandished guns and threatened people. At one point, a fight broke out involving the off-duty police officers and two men, one black and one white.
Several witnesses told police that some of the off-duty officers used racial slurs during the fight. The black man’s motorcycle helmet was used to bash in the white man’s car during the melee, a police report said.
The two men who had been fighting with the off-duty officers, Richard Craig, 27, and Jeffrey Gordon, 28, who is an African-American, were arrested by on-duty officers called to the scene, but later released without charges. Craig was treated at a hospital for injuries incurred in the fight.
Gordon was indicted by the grand jury, apparently because he continued to fight even after uniformed on-duty officers told him to leave the scene of the brawl. He was charged with misdemeanor battery and disorderly conduct.
On Friday, Gordon called the investigation “a farce” and noted that he was not asked to identify photographs of the officers who beat him until five weeks after the brawl.
Only two of the officers were indicted on felony charges, which included battery and perjury and pointing a firearm. The other two indicted police officers were charged with misdemeanors ranging from disorderly conduct and battery to public intoxication.
“We are pleased that 13 of the 17 officers were exonerated. As to the four police officers indicted, we are very disappointed. We still believe that they did not commit criminal misconduct on that evening,” said John Kautzman, attorney for the Fraternal Order of Police in Indianapolis.
“We are very, very disappointed that only one of two civilians involved was indicted because we feel they were heavily involved,” he added.
Kautzman said he does not believe that any of the alleged racial or sexual taunts by the officers actually occurred. The officers “were off-duty attending a ball game, and we believe a situation developed that they were required to deal with in the best way they knew how,” he said.
Even before the indictments were returned, the repercussions from the incident were widespread in this city of 800,000.
Initially, Mayor Goldsmith briefly postponed his hotly contested gubernatorial campaign to deal with the matter. It has been particularly troublesome for him not only because of his election fight but also because one of the officers involved lives with Goldsmith’s longtime personal assistant, who attended the ball game but not the postgame events.
Goldsmith also was forced to ask for Police Chief Christ’s resignation after it was revealed that just two days after the brawl he joined some of the accused officers at another baseball game.
After Christ’s resignation, Goldsmith announced he had hired Reuben Greenberg, chief of police in Charleston, S.C., and an authority on police management, as a consultant to establish “a fair and firm disciplinary process” within the Indianapolis Police Department.
Goldsmith said this week prior to the indictments that while his police department has been “relatively free from corruption,” it has had problems with “a little bit of overly aggressive conduct on the part of some officers, which we need to aggressively deal with.”