Crisis management of crime
August 8, 10 and 12, 2006
A series of murders during
one weekend in August didn’t only cause Indianapolis officials to finally take
action to fix the city’s woeful public safety system. As its projects
specialist, I also pushed the editorial page to tear up the paper’s old
two-editorial lineup to pull together the kind of packages that ordinarily
would have ran on Sunday.
The first day of the series,
“Casualties of neglect,” looked at the numerous murders that happened during the
year up to August and reminded readers that the neglect of public safety had
made martyrs of many of their fellow citizens. A sidebar detailed one
particularly heinous slaying, in which a woman and her roommate were killed by
an ex-boyfriend while her children were sleeping.
The second day, discussing
all the emergency measures taken by Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson in
reaction to the summer slayings, also featured sidebars discussing how all
these measures – and the consequences of failing to deal adequately with
staffing police departments and courts – were adding up in dollars. One of the
sidebars detailed how one aspect of the criminal justice system added insult to
injury for both accused felons and taxpayers alike.
The final day took a look at
the “Seeds of Violence,” including the academic woes of Indianapolis’ public
schools system. One piece in the package followed up on the “Juvenile
injustice” series written months earlier, detailing the lives of two brothers
who have landed in juvenile court. Readers learned how the mutual neglect of
schools and parents help foster violence on the city’s streets.
All of this was done by a
skeleton crew of copy editors and one editorial writer who simply thought of
new ways of discussing one of the most pressing issues in the nation’s 13th-largest city.
-------------------------
The Series
Casualties
of neglect
Crisis
management of crime
Seeds of violence [August 12, 2006]
Related editorials
Vexed in the city: Underlying causes of crime continue to plague neighborhoods [Sept. 17, 2006]
Mean streets: Indianapolis tops New York, Detroit in some categories of crime [Aug. 2, 2006]