Indianapolis Wrestles With Police Melee

The police officers’ party started out as a reward from the city for a job well done. But the evening was destined to end in disgrace.

The honored guests heard a few words of thanks from the chief, who joined them to watch the minor-league Indianapolis Indians baseball game from a sky box in the new ballpark. Afterward, some of the group, all off-duty white males, went to a bar.

Then they spilled out onto a busy downtown sidewalk on Meridian Street, harassing women and shouting racial epithets.

By the time they were done, a black motorist and a white friend who had come to his aid had been beaten, in full view of a crowd that later eagerly told their stories for the television cameras. The driver was jailed, his friend was in a hospital and this Corn Belt metropolis of 742,000 people had another police scandal on its hands.

So far, the fallout has resulted in the second police chief in a year stepping down in the wake of complaints about the handling of suspected abuse. Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, the Republican nominee for governor whose 9-percentage-point lead in the polls has evaporated into a statistical dead heat, suspended campaign activities one recent weekend to deal with the matter.

Hundreds of pickets have shown up regularly at the City-County Building ever since the Aug. 27 incident. A 15-group coalition has filed a petition in state court for a special prosecutor and is pressing for long-term changes in police department training, hiring and discipline. The city’s population is 22.4% black; the police force is 17% black.

Longtime civil rights activists here regard the unfolding saga of the downtown brawl with a combination of raw anger and wry delight. “Meridian Street” is becoming local shorthand in the way “Rodney King” and “Mark Fuhrman” did in Los Angeles. Like the notorious video and the infamous tapes, detractors of the Indianapolis Police Department say, the melee offers evidence that their criticisms ring true. And they hope it may provide the chance for reform.

“White people saw it. White ministers,” said the Rev. Wayne T. Harris, the black pastor of a 5,000-member urban congregation. “It is a time of justification. Almighty God is allowing what has existed to become uncovered in these days.”

The last year has been quite a time. On the ethnically mixed North Side, a July 1995, protest over the alleged beating by police of a handcuffed young black man erupted into two days of looting that Goldsmith described as a “mini-riot.” One officer was suspended for two days as a result of the incident, although a police investigation found no evidence of brutality.

Soon afterward, Police Chief James Toler, who is black, quit his post. Harris says Toler told him privately that his “hands were tied” in dealing with problem officers. Toler stayed on as a police major in the downtown district and has declined comment.

In July, an all-white jury returned a $4.3-million judgment in a civil suit brought by the family of Michael Taylor, a young black man shot to death in 1987 while handcuffed in the back seat of a squad car. No criminal charges have been brought against police, who said Taylor committed suicide.

On Aug. 26, a policeman killed another young black man, Alexis Garvin, blocks away from a robbery scene.

The baseball outing was the next night. Goldsmith, who is white, says any officers who engaged in the behavior chronicled by witnesses “acted egregiously.” But, he added, he believes that protest has flared because “there are people who’d rather have controversy than solution. We need to work to solve these problems.”

Donald Christ, the latest police chief to resign, thinks the whole incident has been blown out of proportion. In a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he was vacationing recently, he said: “What do we have here? A couple of people had too much to drink, got stupid, said some stupid things. That’s not to say it’s right; it’s not.

“But in the scope of life, we don’t have somebody who picked up an AK-47 and walked into the post office, or set off a bomb.”

The police officers in question had spent the summer working overtime in exercises for a “mobile field force.” They were being trained to quickly come together from different parts of the city to manage any type of crisis, from a tornado to an unruly mob.

More than 300 of the department’s 1,000 officers participated in the training. A police lieutenant called Christ to explain that a dozen or so would get free tickets to the Indians game at Victory Field; he invited Christ, who is white, along.

Christ made a short speech of gratitude to the officers. He said later that he noticed the officers were drinking beer but he didn’t see anyone who seemed intoxicated or offensive. He didn’t know many of the officers, he said, and spent most of the evening talking to one man he’d worked with before.

He said he went home at the end of the game. Others did not.

About 11 p.m., some of the officers walked north on Meridian Street, a popular strip for cruising and strolling. More than two dozen witnesses said the men grabbed their crotches and issued lewd invitations to women on the street.

Six members of a suburban Westfield family, including three ministers, were heading for their parked van at the time. One told the Indianapolis Star that she heard one of the white men yell a racial slur.

A policeman, Gregory Gehring, reported later that a black convertible screeched to a halt and the driver, a 27-year-old black man named Jeffery Gordon, got out, assuming “what appeared to be a fighting stance.”

“People I had been with . . . had been talking loudly,” Gehring wrote, “at which time, the subject may have taken offense.”

Gordon gave this account: He stopped to yell to a friend, Richard Craig, who had just passed him on a motorcycle. He said a group of men had shouted at him but he didn’t hear what they said. When he got out of the car, about five of them approached and one pushed him. The fight was on.

Craig also was caught up in the battle. He was treated for bruises at Wishard Memorial Hospital and released.

“It was the most unfair thing I saw in my life,” one of the ministers told the paper. “They were half-drunk. I told one cop: ‘You guys are a disgrace.’ ” He said: “I mean, he was blowing Budweiser in my face.” He summoned uniformed police.

The two friends were arrested on suspicion of battery, but no formal charges have been filed.

The department’s internal investigation into the events on Meridian Street was suspended when the county prosecutor said he would convene a grand jury. The officers who had been under investigation remained in their jobs.