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Last updated on Friday, June 27, 2014
(INDIANAPOLIS) - Indianapolis police will hold community meetings and monitor people with histories of violent crime as part of their effort to reduce crime this summer.
IMPD also now has a full-time SWAT team, which has been at work for several weeks, and will be using those officers on patrol this summer, as well as moving some officers out of offices and onto street patrols. The plan was announced Thursday by Mayor Ballard, Public Safety Commissioner Troy Riggs and IMPD Chief Rick Hite.
"We will have a focus on intelligence and taking action based on that intelligence, and we will conduct sweeps that the one earlier this week that resulted in 60 arrests", said Ballard, referring to what police called "Operation C.L.E.A.N. Sweep." Some of the intelligence will be gathered by Operation SAFE, a joint project of IMPD and the FBI.
Whenever a violent crime takes place in a neighborhood, the city's plan calls for community impact meetings in the affected neighborhood within 72 hours of the crime, meetings that will be organized by the city. "People consider neighborhood safety when choosing where to move; we can never forget that. A few of our Indianapolis neighborhoods have big challenges ahead of them," Ballard said.
One focus of the plan is to cut down on the number of shootings where there is more than one victim. Chief Hite says those have risen dramatically. "In 2013, there were 125 homicide incidents, four of which had multiple victims. In 2014, we have had eight homicides where there were multiple victims, including one with four victims, and those people all knew each other," Hite said.
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