Category Archives: Criminal Justice

Things That Drive Me Nuts…

I’m annoyed and I need to vent.

A comprehensive list of things I find infuriating (or that drive me to drink) would be far too long to post. (I’m pretty cranky.) That said, I want to focus this diatribe on two related falsehoods: the widespread, rampant dishonesty about crime rates generally, and the related, wildly distorted perceptions of danger in the downtown I happily inhabit.

Crime and punishment first.

In the upcoming election, Indianapolis voters will decide whether to retain Democrat Ryan Mears–our current prosecutor–or replace him with Philip Foust, his Republican opponent. As you might expect, those opposed to Mears are trotting out all the usual tropes about criminals running rampant through the streets of Marion County, and claiming that this (nonexistent) onslaught is a direct result of Mears being “soft on crime.”

The Indianapolis Star actually looked at the data–delving into plea deals, convictions and the like, and pretty thoroughly debunked that accusation. (It’s a lengthy article, and my own impression after reading it was that what really annoys at least one of Mears’ critics–the head of the police union–is that Mears isn’t “soft” on police misconduct.)

I happen to greatly admire Prosecutor Mears, who has angered GOP culture warriors by announcing that he isn’t going to send teenagers to jail for smoking small amounts of weed, and that he definitely isn’t going to prosecute women who’ve had abortions. They’re free to criticise those decisions; that’s politics. What makes me fume is the phoney rhetoric that accompanies those criticisms–accusations about the presumed prevalence of crime in our city.

I’ve looked at the data: Total homicides are about half of what they were five years ago. One source puts the drop from the 2021 peak at roughly 45%, with 2025 as the fourth straight year of decreases. Non-fatal shootings have been cut in half since 2022, and IMPD has reported a 38% decline so far in 2026 compared with the same point in 2025. Robberies have dropped nearly 60 percent, according to IMPD’s mid-year 2026 statistics.

The clear implication of the political charges being thrown at Mears is that crime is on the upswing and it’s his fault, so the actual steep decline in the Marion County crime rate is rather inconvenient. More to the point, in real life, the successes and failures of the criminal justice system are a function of the way the entire system–including police, prosecutors, and judges–operates.

And that brings me to the second of today’s irritations, the belief that the Indianapolis downtown is especially dangerous. Last December, then-IMPD Chief Chris Bailey reported that downtown accounts for less than 6% of crime in the entire city.

One reason for the belief that downtown is a hellhole is that, whenever a criminal incident does occur downtown, it garners publicity that feeds a perception that is simply not supported by that pesky thing called data. There is, rather obviously, another reason for the belief in downtown’s dangers–a belief held primarily by suburbanites and those who retreat each night to the presumed safety of gated communities.

As I have noted previously, thanks to Trump’s rhetoric and his constant assaults on immigrants of color, the racism that has always been latent in much of our population has surfaced and become far more pronounced. Densely populated urban areas–especially city centers–are typically diverse. (The IBJ recently reported that the Indianapolis downtown–with its 30,500 residents–is 8.6% Asian, 16.2% Black, 8.9% Hispanic, 61.9% White and 4.4% other. In lily-White Indiana, that’s diverse.)

In other words, there are more of “those people” downtown. And “those people” are scary. Dangerous. (If you believe MAGA rhetoric, “they” are all criminals…)

I live in the very center of Indianapolis. I walk to my bank, to my dentist, to my grocery store, to a variety of bars and restaurants. I have never felt threatened. Believe it or not, the people I pass on the street who don’t look like me are just  people who don’t look like me, going about their own business.

Thanks to the current political environment fostered by Trump and MAGA, Americans are constantly being primed to fear anyone who can be considered “other.” Folks who live in less diverse precincts are vulnerable to that fear. It’s pernicious and unfounded. (One example: a couple of months ago, I tripped on a sidewalk that needed repair–the condition of our sidewalks is a legitimate critique of downtown–and several of “those people” rushed to help me up and ask if I was okay.)

Perhaps if those frightened people spent more time downtown, they’d be less likely to buy into the stereotypes.

OK. Rant over.

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Wow…Just Wow

I continue to be astonished by the brazenness with which the Trump administration displays its racism, lawlessness and corruption.

The attacks on diversity and inclusion have accelerated; a recent effort would deny a tax exemption to private universities that take race or ethnicity into account in any way. The administration continually insists that any attempts to ameliorate–or even acknowledge–the effects of decades of discrimination are themselves discriminatory. Its daily war against civic equality extends to its efforts to stigmatize Muslims and people of color.

Examples of financial corruption are too numerous to list: pardons issued in return for contributions, no-bid contracts to cronies, the continued bilking of Trump’s MAGA believers with crypto and other scams…

And then there’s the jaw-dropping, unbelievable lawlessness. It’s not just the endless streams of ridiculous, facially unconstitutional Executive Orders. The administration increasingly–and overtly–ignores court orders. In several cases, it has deported people the courts have explicitly protected from deportation. The recent program developed by the Postal Service to rig the upcoming midterms–disclosed by a whistleblower–was drafted in brazen defiance of a court’s explicit ruling. Trump has given a metaphorical finger to the rules governing changes to the White House, razing the historic East Wing and constructing his monstrous, gaudy ballroom without bothering to try obtaining the necessary permits, and he has recently announced that he will begin construction on his gargantuan arch in the next couple of weeks, ignoring the pesky rules and procedures that are required before any such work can legally start.

I guess rules are for the “little people.”

Now, the Department of Justice has–as the saying goes–taken it up a notch. Under the odious and corrupt Todd Blanche, the DOJ has moved to protect an ICE agent from criminal accountability. Talking Point Memo has the story.

The Trump DOJ has fired the federal prosecutor who sought to bring civil rights charges against an ICE agent for the January shooting of a man through the closed door of his home during Operation Metro Surge.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans of Minneapolis was fired — and is now himself reportedly under criminal investigation — after ProPublica published emails he sent to lawyers for the victims apologizing that his efforts to bring more serious civil rights charges against ICE agent Christian Castro were being blocked by Main Justice.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in the email. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”

Evans concluded his email: “It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients.”

After Evans was summarily dismissed, Castro was indicted federally on the much lesser charge of making false statements–for allegedly lying to investigators about the incident. (Castro has been in the news recently because Texas Governor Abbott refused to extradite him back to Minnesota, where he is facing separate state charges.)

Evidently, just firing a lawyer for trying to do his job properly wasn’t enough for the vindictive and criminal cabal that now runs America’s Justice department. Several media outlets have reported that the DOJ has begun a federal criminal investigation of Evans. “CBS News says it’s for alleged leaks; the AP says it’s for alleged obstruction of a grand jury probe; the WaPo says it’s for alleged obstruction of justice.”

The DOJ originally brought trumped-up charges against Castro’s victims, but those charges were dropped after evidence emerged that contradicted Castro’s account of the incident.

The Department of Justice is now unrecognizable. For at least the last fifty years, the relationship between the White House and the Justice Department has been governed both by statute and by institutional norms protecting federal prosecutors against political influence. Amazingly, those norms survived Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, and even Trump’s first term.

No longer. Independence, integrity and adherence to the rule of law are now all things of the past.

Today’s Justice department engages in selective and politically motivated prosecutions (especially of the president’s political adversaries). It argues in court and administrative hearings for decisions that will benefit his allies. It lies to the courts. The changes have led to a steady exodus of the best and brightest–during Trump II, DOJ has lost over 2,600 career attorneys—about 21 percent of its total legal staff and part of a broader federal exit of more than 10,000 government lawyers.

Those who are left are expected to toe the line. Evans serves as an example.

Trump’s administration is a criminal enterprise.

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America’s Brownshirts

A rising chorus of critics–academics, politicians and media figures–have compared ICE to Hitler’s Brownshirts, the Stormtroopers who were an early paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. Those comparisons have rested primarily upon five elements: concealed identities, intimidating street “theater” meant to be witnessed, “disappearance” tactics, confusion of law enforcement with state terror tactics, and a legal system that fails to prevent the abuses.

ICE, like Hitler’s Stormtroopers, employs public, sometimes dramatic detentions that are intended to intimidate onlookers. (As a coalition of 21 state attorneys general has written, “the imagery evokes comparisons to repressive tactics that have no place in a free country.”) Critics of ICE have highlighted the incidents in which ICE “enforcers” have emerged from unmarked vehicles with their weapons drawn, and other incidents where they have abruptly taken people off of the street and forced them into unmarked vehicles, noting that such tactics are like those employed by German Stormtroopers and the Gestapo.

The goal of ICE increasingly seems to be less about individual arrests–and certainly not arrests limited to “the worst of the worst”–but about creating a generalized fear among American citizens, especially those who are Brown or Black. That fear is heightened by reports of the horrific conditions that are apparently common in the detention centers they’ve established around the country, and by other reports that have focused on the recruitment of out-and-out thugs and “Proud Boys” to fill ICE ranks.

And now–courtesy of American know-how and technological progress– we’re told that ICE is acquiring a new tool of repression. The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend up to $20 million outfitting ICE officers with electroshock “distraction gloves.” 

The linked essay accurately explains why this represents a frightening escalation of state over-reach. 

In standard law enforcement protocols, the act of reaching for a belt, unholstering a Taser, or brandishing a baton constitutes a clear, observable line of escalation. It alerts observers, signals intent, and creates a distinct temporal beat where both the officer and the subject recognize that severe non-lethal force has entered the room.

Integrating a high-voltage electrical pulse into a standard patrol glove will erase that temporal beat entirely.
The equipment involved, specifically the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.), operates by delivering electrical charges directly through physical contact. An officer doesn’t need to pause, reach, or display a weapon. The mechanism for inflicting immediate physical pain is woven into the very fabric worn on their hands. Force isn’t a tool drawn in response to a crisis; it becomes an instantaneous extension of a touch in this scenario. When the physical barrier to inflicting pain vanishes, the operational will naturally shift toward physical compliance over verbal de-escalation.

There are numerous ways to tell when traditional non-lethal weapons have been used. They leave markers, physical “signatures” that can be used as evidence by those conducting oversight. These gloves, however, don’t puncture the skin. They “inflict acute pain while leaving minimal to no physical trace.” Oversight becomes nearly impossible. As the linked essay warns,

When a state apparatus shifts its enforcement tactics from visible force to invisible compliance, the nature of authority changes. Visible force carries a heavy political and public cost. It draws cameras, invites judicial scrutiny, and demands public justification. Invisible compliance, on the other hand, allows coercive power to be executed quietly, efficiently, and without generating the visual triggers that normally prompt civic pushback….

We don’t maintain a free society by making state coercion easier, quieter, or less noticeable. We maintain it by demanding that every assertion of physical power remains visible, accountable, and subject to public review. When pain can be administered at the touch of a hand without leaving a trace, the burden of restraint shifts entirely to the goodwill of the state. In a constitutional republic, goodwill was never supposed to be the baseline check on power.

Goodwill, of course, has been entirely absent from ICE–and for that matter, from the Trump administration. For those of us familiar with the history of Nazi Germany and the rise of Hitler, the parallels are chilling. In an essay for Medium, Richard Brody has outlined the similarities, concluding that, “while only time will tell if we allow ICE to become this generation’s version of the Gestapo and Brown Shirts, many of the steps and actions taken to date, are eerily similar to the horrific days of Nazi Germany.”

We won’t avert that descent by giving ICE tools that make oversight impossible.

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The Crime Rate

One of the most successful political tools employed by MAGA bigots is fear–fear of dark-skinned people, and especially fear of crime (which, of course, they attribute to those dark-skinned folks). When I venture into suburban areas, I frequently encounter people who express shock that I actually live in my city’s core. Aren’t I afraid? Can I walk the streets? Implicit in those inquiries are two assumptions–a frequently voiced belief that downtown areas are crime-ridden, and a more masked belief that “those people” who populate city centers are criminals.

Facts, apparently, are irrelevant. In a recent column, our Chief of Police noted that crime in downtown Indianapolis represents all of six percent of all crime in our city–a statistic that accounts for my complete lack of wariness when I walk (yes, walk) to the grocery, the dentist, the bank…

My city isn’t the only urban area that is safe.

It turns out that, despite the racist rhetoric of Trump and his enablers, American cities are not hell-holes. (At least they weren’t until ICE was loosed upon them.) As The Atlantic has recently reported, America is currently experiencing a remarkable improvement in public safety. Moreover, that improvement has occurred despite a police-staffing crisis. “In August, the FBI released its final data for 2024, which showed that America’s violent-crime rate fell to its lowest level since 1969, led by a nearly 15 percent decrease in homicide—the steepest annual drop ever recorded.”

Preliminary 2025 numbers look even better. The crime analyst Jeff Asher has concluded that the national murder rate through October 2025 fell by almost 20 percent—and all other major crimes declined as well. The post-pandemic crime wave has receded, and then some. According to Asher’s analysis, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark, and a handful of other big cities recorded their lowest murder rates since the 1950s and ’60s. “

According to Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who studies urban violence, America’s cities are as safe as they’ve ever been in the history of the country.

What is puzzling is that this low point in violent crime has accompanied a downturn in police employment–there were 6 percent fewer officers at the beginning of 2025 than at the beginning of 2020, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, thanks to retirements and departures.

There are many plausible explanations for the recent crime downturn: sharper policing strategy, more police overtime, low unemployment, the lure of digital life, the post-pandemic return to normalcy. Each of these surely played a role. But only one theory can match the decline in its scope and scale: that the massive, post-pandemic investment in local governments deployed during the Biden administration, particularly through the American Rescue Plan Act, delivered a huge boost to the infrastructure and services of American communities—including those that suffered most from violent crime. That spending may be responsible for our current pax urbana.

As a researcher at the University of Chicago put it,  ARPA sent billions of dollars to local governments to use as they saw fit. It turned out that “Investing in education, police, librarians, community centers, social workers, local nonprofits. Local-government employment rolls increased almost perfectly inverse to the crime rate.”

The article described the turn-around in Baltimore, a city that had experienced high crime rates for years, and noted that the approach used in Baltimore was only one “of scores of alternative public-safety ideas that were funded through ARPA.”

Cook County, home of Chicago and the nation’s second-largest county, put roughly $36 million into efforts such as Healing Hurt People Chicago, a trauma-recovery program for crime victims. Mecklenburg County, home of Charlotte, North Carolina, used ARPA to fund a “youth peace summit” and advertise a gun-lock-distribution program. Some ARPA money also bolstered police and sheriff’s departments directly.

The article emphasizes that the monies local governments directed explicitly to crime reduction represented a small percentage of ARPA funds supporting other uses, like summer jobs for teens, blight reduction, and green spaces.  The largest category of ARPA spending was in “government operations”—funding local services and putting people back to work.

It turns out that when local governments have sufficient funding to support more extensive local infrastructures, crime declines. As one mayor put it, “There are so many factors that influence those crime statistics—parademic-response time, jobs programs, conflict-resolution techniques at violence-interrupter organizations, investments in neighborhood conditions. A thousand fathers for that victory of crime reduction.”

The last of ARPA grants will be gone this year. (Many have already been cut by the Trump administration.) We’ll soon see what really works to reduce crime–unleashing the ICE Gestapo on urban people of color, or adequately funding local governments.

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War On Drugs? Give Me A Break!

Will the administration’s obvious war crimes finally motivate Congressional pushback? We can only hope.

As I write this, the media is filled with stories about the attacks on fishing boats ordered by Trump and Hegseth, and evidence of their illegality. Trump has been ordering these vessels blown out of the water, and Hegseth has reportedly ordered survivors murdered, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war.

These actions are being investigated by Congress, and we can only hope that partisanship will not distort that investigation, because the purported reason for these attacks is patently phony. 

Trump insists that the attacks are efforts to stop drug trafficking–that the boats that have been blown out of the water aren’t really fishing vessels. Of course, as is typical for this administration, the boats have been attacked and their occupants killed with absolutely no evidence offered or due process occuring. We’re supposed to take Trump’s word for it (despite ample evidence that when Trump’s lips are moving, he’s lying.)

What makes these allegations even more suspect than other Trump lies is the enormous hypocrisy of Trump’s claim to be against the importation of drugs. As Charlie Sykes–among others–has pointed out, his attacks on these fishing boats and his threats to invade Venezuela come at the same time as his pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, a Honduran ex-president convicted of cocaine trafficking who has boasted about stuffing drugs “up the gringos’ noses.”

The American public is evidently supposed to believe that Trump blew up fishing boats and is threatening  a military campaign in an effort to deter drug trafficking–at the same time he is ordering the release of a man convicted of taking “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels–a man convicted of using the full power and strength of his state — military, police and justice system–to protect drug traffickers, a man who–as prosecutors convincingly demonstrated– allowed “bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.”

As Sykes summed it up:

  • Trump declares war on drug kingpins.
  • Trump’s uses the war on drugs as the justification for extrajudicial murders on the high seas; and calls for the execution of six Democratic members of Congress who tell members of the military they do not need to follow illegal orders.
  • As part of Trump’s war against drug kingpins, SecDef Pete Hegseth orders Seal Team 6 to “kill everybody,” including unarmed survivors.
  • We are inching toward the invasion of Venezuela, because its president is allegedly a drug kingpin.
  • Trump pardons notorious drug kingpin.

Paul Krugman also addressed the obvious hypocrisy,

At first glance, the juxtaposition seems bizarre – Trump is either murdering or committing war crimes against people who are at worst small-time drug smugglers, and may be innocent fishermen, while pardoning a drug lord who was responsible for thousands of American deaths while savaging his own country, Honduras. But there is a pattern to this murderous madness, once one connects the dots between Trump’s mob-boss persona and the billionaire crypto/tech broligarchy.

According to Krugman, Trump’s vendetta against purported penny-ante drug smugglers is intended to set the stage for an invasion of Venezuela. And he reminds us that Trump “positively revels in his association with big-time criminals, whether it’s Putin or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman” or Ross Ulbricht, whose underground e-marketplace is known for drug trafficking, and whom Trump pardoned immediately after assuming office.

Still, why would Trump, whose poll numbers are cratering, generate even more negative headlines by pardoning Hernández, who was duly convicted of conspiring to send more than 400 tons (!) of cocaine to America?

The answer is the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy. In fact, many of Trump’s pardons of the most egregious criminals are closely linked to their influence.

Krugman points out that Peter Thiel was a supporter of Ulbrict and that the ex-president of Honduras is also connected to  the titans of crypto-currency. Those ‘crypto-bros” were also behind Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, formerly the CEO of  cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao pled guilty to charges of violating U.S. laws against money-laundering and was personally fined $50 million, in addition to Binance’s fine of $4.3 billion.

The revelations of wrongdoing go on. And on.

In one of the recently disclosed emails from Jeffrey Epstein, the predator wrote “I have met some very bad people … none as bad as Trump.” In several others, he referred to Trump as insane–and a danger to America.

Believe the predator. 

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