Extra cops paying dividends along downtown canal
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Just after midnight Monday, two people got into some type of fight that ended with at least three 9-millimeter slugs flying through the air.
Two cops patrolling the downtown canal heard the shots and came running.
“They did see one individual fleeing the scene and then saw an individual that had been shot. They applied a tourniquet and had him transported to Eskenazi” hospital, said Phil Burton, downtown commander for Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.
Earlier in the summer, IMPD placed a mobile surveillance camera near an Indianapolis Cultural Trail bridge that crosses over the canal.
There is a marked increase in the number of police on the canal even during the day, but it’s not enough for Donna Gibbs and her husband to stay down here past dark.
“I dont think so. I wish I could say I felt safe but, just like the shooting last night or early this morning, I feel safer where I”m at a home,” said Donna Gibbs of Indianapolis.
Video from a surveillance camera caught possible witnesses to the shooting death of 24-year-old Jessica Doty-Whitaker, a crime that remains unsolved. A small poster of Doty-Whitaker and her daughter has been placed near the where Doty-Whitaker died after the shooting around 3:30 a.m. July 5 in the 700 block of Canal Court.
The memory of that shooting is keeping some people away from the canal at night.
Lisa Green of Indianapolis says she hasn’t been on the canal at night in more than a year.
“Safety, there are not enough people downtown, the protest — so that is scary to all of us,” Green said.
IMPD says that the extra patrols along the canal have reduced some of the violence and crime that plagued the area earlier in the summer. They are hoping the mobile surveillance camera caught the people involved in Tuesday morning’s shooting