New Indianapolis police chief Chris Bailey sat down with Mirror Indy on Tuesday, Feb. 13 to discuss how he will address police shootings and increase police recruitment and retention, as well as whether the perception of Indianapolis as a violent city matches the reality.
On Monday, Bailey was named chief, making him the fourth chosen since Mayor Joe Hogsett took office in 2016.
A native of the west side, Bailey began his career as a city patrol officer in 1999 before rising through the ranks to become a detective, sergeant and lieutenant. He was appointed assistant chief in 2019.
His appointment comes after Indianapolis experienced a surge in police shootings in 2023, leading some community activists to call for the resignation of Bailey’s predecessor, Randal Taylor.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Reducing violent crime
Question: What are your top priorities as you step into this new role?
Answer: Always at the top of our list, regardless of who sits in the seat, is reducing violent crime and protecting the community. That doesn’t change, but some of the other things do change and become higher on the priority list. Retention and recruitment of officers is always at the top of the list. We’re at least 300 officers down depending on which budget number you use, and that’s important to us, and retaining the officers we have so that we don’t lose valuable talent and skilled officers to other agencies. We as the largest agency, with the most robust and best training in the state, have become a tiny training ground for smaller agencies around Central Indiana, and we need to understand why that is. We also know that our officers work a lot. This is a busy place. It’s a major city and major cities have major problems, and so when you can go to smaller cities and work less and feel supported, I think it’s another issue where our officers don’t necessarily feel that they’re supported. Now, that’s because they listen to a lot of chatter that they shouldn’t listen to, because the vast majority of people in this community do care and love and support them and need them in their neighborhoods, but they need constitutional policing, fair policing, fair treatment, those types of things.
We need to review our officer-involved shootings from 2023 to understand whether or not that was an anomaly in a year, or whether there’s been significant issues internally or in the community that need to be addressed so that we can push that number down. We don’t want officers in positions where they could get hurt. We don’t want our community members to be harmed either, so we need to understand what that looks like from both sides. I’m not saying our officers are doing anything wrong. I’m not saying the community is doing anything wrong, but in order for us to make educated decisions, we have to understand all of it.
No significant pay raises
Q: You said officers should feel like they are supported. How do you accomplish that?
A: Well, that’s a tough one, right? We’ve tried over the last four years to do things in response to their needs. We don’t always meet that expectation. We’re in a labor agreement. They see other agencies getting significant pay raises, they don’t see those. They’re in a labor agreement. That is a hindrance and a benefit to our cops in some ways.
You know, 2020 and 2021, specifically, I think were very hard for law enforcement generally. That’s where we saw people leave agencies at a really high rate, and we saw our applications really go down. People were questioning, ‘I may have wanted to have been police, but do I want to put myself and my family under such scrutiny from having to make a split second decision that I know is the right thing to do, but it’s going to be twisted and turned and turned into something else?’
In this city, we’ve been lucky that there were no talks of defunding. Our budget has gone up every single year, even in the height of the issues surrounding policing after George Floyd and riots and other things.
We’re also in a world where social media and the narratives that are put on there are what people accept as being reality. Our cops sometimes hear that and feel like that’s what everybody feels about them when we know that’s not the case. Also, our cops are held to standards or held accountable for things that happen in cities that aren’t Indianapolis, so each time something bad happens in a city where a police department is involved in bad behavior … our cops feel that here. I think that everybody believes that cops are all the same, they’re not human, they’re not people, they don’t feel, they’re not committed to community, so that hurts retention and recruitment. There’s a perception that in some of the smaller communities there’s more support broadly from the political world and other parts of the criminal justice system. I don’t know that is true, but that’s the perception and people’s perception of reality.
Bailey believes perception is worse than reality in Indianapolis
Q: I wanted to ask you about that idea of perception versus reality when it comes to violent crime. After surging in 2020 and 2021, national violent crime rates dropped in 2023, but a recent Gallup poll found that three out of every four Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. In Indianapolis, do you think the perception in this case doesn’t match the reality?
A: I do think there are some misunderstandings about crime. It’s also where people get their news and information from. We are always going to have a hard time keeping up with the speed of social media and the way information travels along and where people get their news. I mean, you work for an organization that’s new, right? You’re adjusting, telling stories and providing information and journalism to where people are getting their news. So some of it is incumbent on people telling those stories to tell the story. If you were to go on certain news organizations’ websites right now, I guarantee you eight of the top 10 stories will be about how someone was shot, killed or otherwise. So if you’re looking at that, if you’re a person who’s not engaged in criminal behavior or living in communities that don’t have to deal with some of these violent crimes, you would think, ‘Oh, Indianapolis is the Wild Wild West.’ That’s not the case. It’s just the same as the perception our cops face that they’re all, you know, whatever label someone wants to put on. It’s not the case. I don’t necessarily know how you tell that story better. We try, but we don’t print the papers, and we don’t put what’s on TV. Whatever gets the clicks is the story getting out there, but we have to keep doing our part in telling the story. Going back to transparency and technology, we have to put the information out for people to see for themselves.
City to launch outside review of officer-involved shootings
Q: You mentioned officer-involved shootings. There were 18 such incidents last year. One of the things you worked on as acting chief was establishing an outside review process for these incidents. What can we expect from this effort?
A: I think we’ve decided on a partner in this, and so we have to create a (memorandum of understanding) and data sharing agreements. Depending on how quickly those are in place, my hope would be sooner rather than later, within the next two or three weeks, that we have an announcement on who it is and really spell out what we’re going to do and how it’s going to look. Any report will be public at the end.
Handling pedestrian safety and aggressive drivers
Q: There were 637 pedestrian-involved incidents and 47 pedestrian deaths in 2023. Where does pedestrian and bicycle safety rank among your concerns, and how do you plan to address it?
A: It’s a huge concern of ours because it’s a huge concern of our community. I think that there needs to be a holistic approach to this. It can’t just be based on law enforcement. Enforcement is obviously part of it, but it’s also on the individual, and you need to be mindful that what you do can impact other people. It’s also how our roads are designed. We need to modernize in some aspects and figure out a way that we can slow things down a little bit for people. As far as what law enforcement can control, I think it goes back to our recruitment and retention part of it. We would love to spend more time doing traffic enforcement, but our limited resources are spread thin, and we do our best to address it as the issues pop up. Each of our service districts have some sort of traffic operations plan that they utilize. We have a lot of money that comes into the city from state and federal grants, DUI enforcement, seat belt enforcement, speeding enforcement, all those things. We have officers that participate in that, and we’ve equipped each of our districts with radar equipment and speed detection equipment so that they can utilize that on their beats.
But there seems to be since 2020, in my view, a lot more people that are driving aggressively, more than we can keep up with. I get my doors blown off in a police car every single day by somebody driving down the interstate or on a normal street. It is a huge issue. I wish I could provide more resources to deal with it, but we just aren’t in the position where we can do that at this point.
I also don’t believe in issuing people in our communities $150-plus tickets when you can correct the behavior by, you know, warnings and things like that. So I’m never going to be a chief that says you’re gonna go out and write tickets. That’s just not our style, it’s not my style. You want to stop the behavior, you can correct that maybe with a warning or talking to. When you get into writing people who can’t put food on their table $150 tickets, and then they lose their license, and then the next time they’re stopped, their car is towed and then they can’t get to the job.
Bailey discusses his own arrest
Q: Being the chief of police is one of the most heavily scrutinized jobs in the city. You’ve been open about your arrest in 2004 in connection with a domestic incident. How will you talk about that experience when you meet with community leaders and residents?
Everyone’s circumstances are different, and I own everything that I’ve done wrong in my life, and everything that I’ve done right. The person I am today is because of the mistake and the successes that I had and the people that have invested in me. Look, I own every bit of it, and there’s nothing you can hide from or run from, but I do believe that people have the ability to do better and be better, and that won’t change, and I’m willing to have a conversation with anybody in the community that wants to discuss everything.
Mirror Indy reporter Peter Blanchard covers local government. Reach him at 317-605-4836 or peter.blanchard@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @peterlblanchard.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
