IMPD responds after video of arrest in downtown Indy sparks criticisms
Multiple videos circulating on social media June 15 depict an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officer shooting a man with a high-pressure air launcher before tackling him to the ground in downtown Indianapolis.
The videos caused some in the community to question whether the IMPD officer used excessive force and if the department would hold the officer accountable, leading IMPD to release a statement saying the incident would undergo a "thorough administrative review."
"It's important to note that the videos currently circulating capture only a portion of the incident and what was occurring in the area at the time," the department's statement read. "We are continuing to gather information about what led up to and followed the events depicted in the video clips."
A video shared on social media starts by showing a Black man attempting to walk away from an IMPD officer, while asking the officer "why are you walking up with that," pointing to a weapon in the officer's hands.
The officer can then be seen putting his hand on the man's chest and slightly pushing the man back. The man then slaps the officer's hand, after which the officer shoots him three times with a TIB90 Pepper Ball launcher from Sabre Red — a projectile weapon that law enforcement describe as nonlethal.
"Are you serious? What am I doing," the man says after being shot, according to the video.
The officer can then be seen grabbing the man as he tries to tackle him to the ground. At one point, the officer yells at the man to "get on the ground," before pushing him to the ground.
That's when three other IMPD officers can be seen getting on top of the man as they try to detain him.
While the man is on the ground, another officer can be seen punching him multiple times, before he goes motionless for a few seconds as police attempt to place handcuffs on him.
In the video, a bystander can be heard yelling, "What is they doing. They're beating the f--- out of him."
Police then sit the man up before taking him away, according to the video.
Shortly after 4 p.m. June 15, IMPD released a statement about the videos, acknowledging the department had seen them and offering preliminary details of what officers say took place.
Shortly after bars in downtown Indianapolis closed for the night, officers in IMPD's event response group were working to manage a large crowd that had formed after two men started to fight one another, shortly before 3:30 a.m., according to the statement.
Officers intervened and separated the two men after giving verbal orders, police said. One of the men then attempted to walk away from the altercation, while the other remained.
That's when the man seen in the video allegedly "squared his shoulders" towards an officer, according to police. This prompted the officer to stick out his hand to create some distance from the man before the man slapped his hand away, the statement read.
The officer then fired three shots at the man, as depicted in the video.
The department said the officer threw the man to the ground because he believed the man was attempting to flee, and another officer punched the man three times in order to "gain control" of the situation.
IMPD has not released the names of the officers involved.
The man was preliminarily charged with disorderly conduct, battery of a public safety official, resisting law enforcement and possession of marijuana, according to police.
Police later determined the man was armed, and officers recovered a weapon on the ground after he was taken into custody.
The department noted the incident will go through the administrative review process to determine if the office's use of force was reasonable.
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Indianapolis Star
10 hours ago
- Indianapolis Star
IMPD responds after video of arrest in downtown Indy sparks criticisms
Multiple videos circulating on social media June 15 depict an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officer shooting a man with a high-pressure air launcher before tackling him to the ground in downtown Indianapolis. The videos caused some in the community to question whether the IMPD officer used excessive force and if the department would hold the officer accountable, leading IMPD to release a statement saying the incident would undergo a "thorough administrative review." "It's important to note that the videos currently circulating capture only a portion of the incident and what was occurring in the area at the time," the department's statement read. "We are continuing to gather information about what led up to and followed the events depicted in the video clips." A video shared on social media starts by showing a Black man attempting to walk away from an IMPD officer, while asking the officer "why are you walking up with that," pointing to a weapon in the officer's hands. The officer can then be seen putting his hand on the man's chest and slightly pushing the man back. The man then slaps the officer's hand, after which the officer shoots him three times with a TIB90 Pepper Ball launcher from Sabre Red — a projectile weapon that law enforcement describe as nonlethal. "Are you serious? What am I doing," the man says after being shot, according to the video. The officer can then be seen grabbing the man as he tries to tackle him to the ground. At one point, the officer yells at the man to "get on the ground," before pushing him to the ground. That's when three other IMPD officers can be seen getting on top of the man as they try to detain him. While the man is on the ground, another officer can be seen punching him multiple times, before he goes motionless for a few seconds as police attempt to place handcuffs on him. In the video, a bystander can be heard yelling, "What is they doing. They're beating the f--- out of him." Police then sit the man up before taking him away, according to the video. Shortly after 4 p.m. June 15, IMPD released a statement about the videos, acknowledging the department had seen them and offering preliminary details of what officers say took place. Shortly after bars in downtown Indianapolis closed for the night, officers in IMPD's event response group were working to manage a large crowd that had formed after two men started to fight one another, shortly before 3:30 a.m., according to the statement. Officers intervened and separated the two men after giving verbal orders, police said. One of the men then attempted to walk away from the altercation, while the other remained. That's when the man seen in the video allegedly "squared his shoulders" towards an officer, according to police. This prompted the officer to stick out his hand to create some distance from the man before the man slapped his hand away, the statement read. The officer then fired three shots at the man, as depicted in the video. The department said the officer threw the man to the ground because he believed the man was attempting to flee, and another officer punched the man three times in order to "gain control" of the situation. IMPD has not released the names of the officers involved. The man was preliminarily charged with disorderly conduct, battery of a public safety official, resisting law enforcement and possession of marijuana, according to police. Police later determined the man was armed, and officers recovered a weapon on the ground after he was taken into custody. The department noted the incident will go through the administrative review process to determine if the office's use of force was reasonable.
Los Angeles Times
13 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Political violence is threaded through recent U.S. history. The motives and justifications vary
The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States. The list, in the last two months alone: the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages; and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania's governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside. Here is a sampling of other attacks before that — the assassination of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York City late last year; the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally during his presidential campaign last year; the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories; and the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) by a gunman at a congressional softball game practice. 'We've entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,' said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. 'A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.' Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews was trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump's push to limit immigration. The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police. 'You're seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,' said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. 'It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.' The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, including presidential assassinations dating to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynchings and other violence aimed at Black people in the South, and the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the last few years, however, have reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when political leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has closed units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally. 'We're at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,' Ware said. One of Trump's first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump's 2020 election loss. Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: 'They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you're a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.' Often, those who engage in political violence don't have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country's partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called 'nihilistic ideations.' But each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as fliers for the day's anti-Trump 'No Kings' parades. Conservatives online seized on the fliers — and the fact that Boelter had apparently once been reappointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. 'The far left is murderously violent,' billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X. It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker's then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures falsely theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: 'Where is Nancy?!' No prominent Republican ever denounced the Pelosi assault, and GOP leaders including Trump joked about the attack at public events in its aftermath. On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. 'All of us must remember that it's not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,' she wrote. After mocking the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, Trump on Saturday joined in the bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them 'horrific violence.' The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls 'sick' and 'evil,' and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests. The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration's immigration operations in Los Angeles during the last week, when he pledged to 'HIT' disrespectful protesters and warned of a 'migrant invasion' of the city. Dallek said Trump has been 'both a victim and an accelerant' of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country. 'It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,' he said, 'and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.' Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.
Politico
18 hours ago
- Politico
Pardon hopefuls pitch themselves as judicial system victims — just like Trump
President Donald Trump has railed against the judicial system for years. And prospective pardonees, in turn, are modeling themselves after Trump to increase their chances of winning his favor. The bulk of the over 1,500 clemencies the president has issued in his second term have been granted to celebrities, politicians, Trump donors and loyalists — including those convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — many of whom have used their platforms to make the case that the judicial system was manipulated against them for political reasons, just like the president himself. After Trump pardoned his longtime supporter and former Virginia sheriff, Scott Jenkins, of conspiracy to commit bribery at the end of May, the Department of Justice pardon attorney, Ed Martin, took to X to make clear the administration's priorities: 'No MAGA left behind.' That spirit appears to have pervaded the administration's pardons process — or at least, the perception of it has. Some people in search of clemency, like former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat, have appeared to be angling for a pardon by hooking into Trump's argument about judicial weaponization, arguing that they, too, are victims of the system. Menendez has penned multiple lengthy tracts on X about his victimhood from the weaponization of the Justice Department, and made a thinly veiled plea for clemency in a post shortly after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison at the end of January. 'President Trump is right. This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system,' Menendez wrote at the time, tagging the president's official account. The New Jersey Democrat has yet to receive Trump's blessing. A lawyer for Menendez did not respond to a request for comment. Menendez isn't the only Democrat who has seemingly cozied up to the president to clinch a pardon. New York Mayor Eric Adams appeared to pounce on the suggestion that Trump was open to granting him a pardon in his now-dismissed federal corruption case earlier this year, even showing up at the president's inauguration after repeatedly saying he was unlikely to attend the event. Adams' decision to pass on New York's Martin Luther King Jr. Day events to show face at Trump's inauguration rankled Black political and religious leaders in his home state, who said the choice indicated the mayor was more interested in a pardon than his constituents. His case was ultimately dismissed — over the objection of attorneys working on it — after Adams signaled he would assist the Trump administration on immigration and national security measures. White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields maintained that the president is wielding his pardon powers 'to right many wrongs,' adding that Trump's actions fall 'within his constitutional authority.' 'President Trump doesn't need lectures from Democrats about his use of pardons,' Fields said in a statement, bashing Joe Biden's pardons of his son and Anthony Fauci, among others. 'President Trump is using his pardon and commutation powers to right many wrongs, acting reasonably and responsibly within his constitutional authority.' Others, like reality TV couple Julie and Todd Chrisley, have had better luck than Menendez. In a case that garnered national attention, Trump at the end of May pardoned the longtime reality stars, who had been convicted of bank and wire fraud in 2022 and sentenced to seven and 12 years in prison. The pardons came after a relentless messaging campaign by their daughter, Savannah, who publicly supported Trump throughout his 2024 presidential campaign and made an appearance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to speak about the justice system that she said was targeting both her family and Trump. 'We have a two-faced justice system. Just look at what they're doing to President Trump,' she said at the 2024 convention. 'All while, let's face it, Hunter Biden is roaming around free and attending classified meetings.' After their May 28 pardon, the Chrisleys held a press conference where they thanked the president and his administration — and previewed their new TV series. Virginia Tech political science professor Karen Hult, who specializes in the powers of the presidency and the executive branch, said that while issuing pardons in arenas of personal interest to the president isn't necessarily unusual — see Jimmy Carter's pardon of people who evaded the Vietnam War draft — repeatedly circumventing the Justice Department's pardons process, as Trump has done, is a less-than-common occurrence. 'Mr. Trump, especially in his second term, seems to be especially distinctive in really not wanting to use advice from anybody else, but certainly not from career civil servants, especially in the Justice Department,' Hult said, noting that, for the first time in modern history, the president replaced the head of the DOJ's pardon office with a political appointee. Trump's selection of Martin, whose short-lived stint as the U.S. Attorney for D.C. ended after his nomination for the full-time job failed, put a vocal MAGA figure in the traditionally nonpolitical office. Martin has been a staunch defender of people connected with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and fired dozens of prosecutors who pursued riot-related cases during his time as U.S. attorney. In response to a question about the nature of the pardon process and the perception of partisanship surrounding the system, a DOJ spokesperson said the office of the pardon attorney 'administers the executive process, reviews applications for executive clemency submitted to the Department of Justice, and makes recommendations to grant or deny those applications based on the Justice Manual,' adding that 'the Department is committed to timely and carefully reviewing all applications and making recommendations to the President and Pardon Czar that are consistent, unbiased, and uphold the rule of law.' A senior administration official, granted anonymity to speak freely about the pardons process, pushed back on claims that the administration was circumventing the traditional pardons process. The official maintained that the DOJ, Martin and pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson — who herself was the recipient of a 2020 pardon from Trump before he selected her for the role in his second term — review each pardon case individually before making their recommendations to the president. But not everyone is so eager to be spared. Pam Hemphill, who earned the online moniker 'MAGA Granny' for her role in the Capitol riot, was one of the Jan. 6 rioters pardoned by the president on his first day in office. But Hemphill, who has since apologized for the part she played in that day's violence and has spoken out against the president, rejected Trump's pardon, saying she doesn't want to play into Trump's hands. 'I cannot have this happen, because then I'm part of Trump's narrative that the DOJ is weaponized,' Hemphill said in an interview. According to Hemphill, Trump's lengthy list of pardons is part of his broader mission to build a narrative around the existence of the 'deep state' and argue that the DOJ was 'weaponized against him' under the Biden administration. But not all of those pardoned by Trump have obvious ties to the president. Two clemency recipients, Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr., were pardoned of a 2022 theft conviction after freeing what they believed at the time to be illegally captured sharks from a line off the coast of Florida. Mansell said in an interview he's not sure why the president chose him as a pardon recipient. He said he has never promoted the president online — in fact the professional shark diver avoids publicly talking about politics in order to maintain a neutral business profile that doesn't alienate potential customers. According to Mansell, his legal team did not apply for a pardon. 'I'd love to ask him, like, 'Hey, did you do this because you like sharks?'' Mansell said of the president, adding that it's 'anybody's guess' what actually prompted Trump to pardon him. But whatever the reason, Mansell said he hoped the pardon wasn't 'politically driven.' 'I hope to believe that it wasn't just politically driven on his part,' he said. 'I hope to believe that, you know, he read Cato's article and he saw the injustice in the situation and did it because it was the right thing to do.'
