Who Are The Bad Guys Anyway?

Former Star reporter Dick Cady once won a Pulitzer prize for his investigative reporting on widespread corruption within Indianapolis' police department back in the 1970s. Because of his work, a lot of police officers went to jail and a prosecutor was shown the door by voters. Many years later he penned a mystery novel, The Executioner's Mask, which is described as "uncovering a police force decaying from corruption and a city collapsing under its own injustice." As Matt Sledge wrote in reviewing Cady's book in 2004, Cady wasn't writing about our city during the 1970s, but the present day:

Cady still sees Indianapolis as a city with a seamy underside of corruption. It can be hard to believe this in 2004, at a time when everything appears to have been corporatized and sanitized, and every politician has a perfect sound-bite excuse for every misdeed. Cady’s book is a portal into an Indianapolis that still exists. It’s not just the Midwestern mid-sized market that the ad execs on the coasts see. It’s a living, breathing community that needs to be vigilantly guarded by people with a sense of honor and a love for the place they call home. Gannett has a habit of buying up papers with a few Pulitzers hanging on the walls. When Gannett came to town, Cady left The Star, along with a host of talented, veteran reporters. No Pulitzers have followed.

And so it is with amazement when today's Star reporters routinely report in today's newspaper a guilty plea from IMPD officer Noble Duke for tipping off members of the Haughville syndicate last summer as the feds prepared to round more than three dozen of its members up in one of the biggest drug busts in recent Indianapolis memory. After reading my post today on the Star report, a regular Advance Indiana reader wrote to me in complete anger. With his permission, I am sharing with you his reaction to the story:

Please forgive me if I'm over reacting but that article in the Star reads like a complete whitewash of the entire affair. Numerous questions abound.

1) The crooked cop gets tagged in June immediately following this HUGE raid and NO ONE in this entire city, including the blogsphere, doesn't know about? That's extremely hard to believe.

2) The crooked cop states that he acted as an informant to the drug dealers because of "association or friendship"? Are we supposed to believe that!

3) The crooked cop doesn't just inform one dealer he contacts AS MANY AS 15 DEALERS!

4) The crooked cop says he did not receive ANY MONEY by tipping off these dealers and stated to one dealer that "I could lose my job doing this". Does IMPD and the media expect the public to buy this story!

5) The crooked cop is NOT IN JAIL, HE'S STILL OUT ON THE STREET! Isn't that a wee bit unusual considering the magnitude of the crime?

6) Who is INDIVIDUAL # 1 that the crooked cop first tipped off? This person was arrested so why wasn't their name released?

7) IMPD Spokesman Sgt. Paul Thompson states: " This type of behavior is not acceptable". NO SHIT!!!!!

If the reader sounds a little bit upset, he has every right to be. The reader is a respectable member of our community who has fought tirelessly to clean up criminal elements threatening his own neighborhood. Sadly, he discovered that the neighborhood cops he called upon for assistance were more interested in aiding the drug dealers operating a crack house down the alley from his home than they were in helping him to clean up his neighborhood. "If you don't like it, then move," he was told by one of the cops. When he attempted to use self-help to run the crack dealers out of the rented house, IMPD responded in kind by handcuffing him and placing him under arrest, and then taking him on a several-hour ride in the back of a police paddy wagon before dropping him off at Mid-Town Clinic to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. When the psychiatrist came in the room to see him, his first question to the man was: "What did you do to piss off the police?"

After police finally raided the neighborhood crack house in question, TWO WEEKS LATER!, the police found no drugs. It turns out the raid was all for show. The principal drug dealer at this location was briefly handcuffed while the police searched the home. He was later uncuffed and permitted to drive away in one of those big black SUVs that drug dealers seem to always drive. Of course, he likely had been tipped off about the raid by a "friendly cop." The drug dealers moved to a new location where the neighbors wouldn't complain and the neighborhood cops wouldn't be bothered by intruding neighbors who won't stop complaining until the crack house is gone. The new location was probably a rented home owned by the same east side business which seems to rent a lot of houses in this city to drug dealers.

At some point, people have to say enough is enough. Tomorrow, Mayor Greg Ballard will deliver his state of the city address. Will there be any talk of cleaning up corruption in IMPD? Will Mayor Ballard acknowledge the existence of corruption in IMPD? Last year, city taxpayers were compelled to pay an additional $90 million in extra taxes to pay for public safety. Isn't it ironic that some of the very people who benefit from the higher taxes we're now paying and who are charged with helping to protect this city are in fact the persons responsible for the crime which is tearing our city apart?