IMPD: Broad Ripple businesses can help prevent violent crimes
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department on Tuesday called on business owners in Broad Ripple to prevent violence in the neighborhood.
This comes after a shooting just before 1 a.m. Sunday near Guilford and Broad Ripple avenues left people shaken. One person was stable upon being taken to a hospital, IMPD says.
Just minutes before the shooting, Tim Barsten was walking his dog. After getting inside, he said heard, “Gunshots. Lots of gunshots.”
“It was frightening. I was shaking.”
Once 11 p.m. hits on the weekends, Barsten said, that is when the area starts to get a little dicey.
“On the weekend, a lot of people will just be sitting there hanging out in the parking lot and those are typically where the shootings happen,” Barsten said.
Barsten said violence is giving the neighborhood a bad reputation.
“Broad Ripple’s a really great spot, and this nighttime terror is making it seem like it’s a really bad spot. We just kind of get a bad wrap from those few hours on the weekends,” Barsten said.
He would like to see business owners who have problem parking lots do something to prevent violence in the neighborhood.
A boarded-up window on the side of an apartment building marked the area where that exact scenario played out Sunday morning.
IMPD tells I-Team 8 it’s aware of the problem of people gathering in parking lots to hang out, but says the department can’t do anything unless business owners call them to get people to leave. So, IMPD is calling on businesses to step up and do their part to prevent violence.
Officer William Young, an IMPD spokesman, said of the businesses, “They could do better. They could reach out to us. If you see folks while your business is going on, they’re not patronizing your business, they’re on your property, maybe causing a problem, we want you to call our officers out and say, ‘Hey, we don’t want this particular person on our property.’”
IMPD is not calling out any specific businesses, but the department has suggestions for the ones where the ingredients for violence are boiling over into weekend gunfire.
“We want you to hire, maybe, off-duty officers, maybe security. We want you to work with us a little bit more,” Young said.