'Transparency and accountability': Hogsett speaks out on 2 police shootings

After two men were fatally shot by Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers this month, Mayor Joe Hogsett told IndyStar he is committed to transparency and accountability in the investigations.

The mayor also said he continues to support the police department and police chief Randal Taylor, and thinks his administration has made progress in filling gaps in the mental health system that he said lead to incidents like these.

"I don’t consider the department to be anything other than one of the finest police departments in the country," Hogsett said in an interview Tuesday afternoon with IndyStar. He added, "Any death is a tragedy. Any criminal homicide is a tragedy. Any police action shooting that ends in death is a tragedy and we’re truly committed to minimizing and lowering those numbers as low as we can possibly get them."

Gary Harrell, a 49-year-old Black man, was shot in the back on Aug. 3 by IMPD Officer Douglas Correll as Harrell was running away with his back was turned, IMPD body camera footage released last week showed.

Kendall Darnell Gilbert, 40, was shot by an IMPD officer on Aug. 27 after an hours-long standoff between police and Gilbert, who was holding a machete. Over the weekend, the police had responded multiple times to Gilbert's residence on calls reporting Gilbert was undergoing a mental health episode.

The shooting of Harrell prompted Indianapolis clergy for the resignation of Taylor over what they said is a lack of accountability.

Asked if the incidents make him reevaluate his support for the police department and Taylor, Hogsett said that he fully supports Taylor and IMPD. Hogsett said they are just as committed to police openness, transparency and accountability as he is.

Hogsett declined to comment specifically about the individual officer-involved shootings but said they will be investigated thoroughly both criminally as well as in the internal IMPD review process.

"We have spent almost now seven-and-a-half years making progress, filling gaps in the mental health system, that unfortunately, all too often may lead to incidents like (these ones)," Hogsett said. "But we are far closer than we were when this administration began to be able to fill those gaps."

Shreve blames Hogsett's administration

Hogsett's Republican challenger in this year's mayoral election, Jefferson Shreve, blamed the Hogsett Administration for the officer involved shootings and pointed to the police officer shortage.

"We continue to see the catastrophic effects of the Hogsett administration’s failure to support our police," Shreve said. "We’re down 300 officers, and our existing officers are stretched thin."

Shreve is campaigning for mayor on increasing recruitment and retention of IMPD officers through better supporting police and hiring a public safety director, a position scrapped by Mayor Hogsett when he took office in 2016 as part of bureaucratic restructuring.

Shreve has also said he would also address root causes of crime, including mental health, and provide transparency through sharing of data about police actions, prosecutorial actions and criminal court actions.

He added that these are tragic situations and that he awaits the findings of the review process that is already underway.

Hogsett on hiring more police officers

Hogsett acknowledged that the city needs to hire more police officers and said his administration has taken steps to do so, including recruiting almost 800 new officers during his tenure and raising officer salaries this year.

He said his administration has worked to create processes around transparency and accountability, especially for officer-involved shootings.

He cited the creation of a new IMPD use of force policy in 2020, mandating civilian majorities on the Use of Force Review Board and the new General Orders Board in 2020, requiring body cameras to be worn on all police officers in 2020, and anti-bias and de-escalation training in the curriculum at the police academy, as examples of steps his administration has taken to prevent police action shootings.

A cornerstone of Hogsett's gun violence reduction strategy has been addressing mental health crises, including creating and funding a clinician-led community response team designed to respond to mental health calls instead of police. The proposed 2024 budget includes record police spending as well as expanding the team, violence intervention programs, and expanding the city's mental health and drug addiction treatment center, the Assessment and Intervention Center, to 60 beds.

But Hogsett suggested that the incident that ended in Gilbert's death would not have been one that the clinician-led team responded to, because Gilbert had a machete.

"I do know that community-led clinician response teams are never dispatched if there is a weapon present," Hogsett said, "or if there is serious concern that the operator has that a clinician-led team would happen upon a situation where there’s danger to the clinicians themselves as well as danger to the alleged perpetrator or members of his or her family."

In addition to IMPD's criminal investigations into both officer-involved shootings, the civilian-majority Use of Force Review board will conduct a mandatory hearing for attempted use of deadly force on a person after the conclusion of the criminal process.

Contact IndyStar reporter Ko Lyn Cheang at kcheang@indystar.com or 317-903-7071. Follow her on Twitter: @kolyn_cheang.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Hogsett said he's committed to accountability after police shootings