Law enforcement outlines measures to prevent violence in Broad Ripple over holiday weekend

Law enforcement announced measures to prevent violence in Broad Ripple beginning this coming holiday weekend.

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department will limit parking in the neighborhood, and additional security cameras and light towers will be in use. On Wednesday, Broad Ripple bar and restaurant owners said that they would close their businesses at 1 a.m. every day until further notice.

“If your intent to come into Broad Ripple or any of our other communities is to cause trouble, to look for a fight, to settle some kind of score, Broad Ripple is not the place,” said IMPD Chief Randal Taylor at a news conference Friday. “Honestly, Indianapolis is not the place.”

Earlier this week, the Broad Ripple Village Association announced that it wants to make the neighborhood gun-free on Friday and Saturday evenings through the end of August. However, the association faces logistical hurdles to do so.

Gun-free zones are a recent initiative of Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett. Private groups can request a special event permit to have leased out public property be gun-free. Then, IMPD can help enforce the ban.

To implement the gun-free zone, the association needs to obtain insurance and technology to screen for weapons. Additionally, entry and exit points into the village need to be established and staff is needed to do security work.

“While I think about Broad Ripple as a small quaint village, it's not as small when you're doing something like this,” said Jordan Dillon, executive director of the Broad Ripple Village Association. “So that's an added challenge. There’s not just one thing we're trying to work through, there's several things.”

The request follows a weekend of violence in the neighborhood, after three people were killed and one person was injured early Sunday morning in a shooting on Broad Ripple Avenue.

More details on the effort to make Broad Ripple gun-free are expected to be announced soon.

Contact WFYI criminal justice reporter Katrina Pross at kpross@wfyi.org. Follow on Twitter: @katrina_pross.

Pross is a Corps Member of Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project.