INDIANAPOLIS — The 2024 Indiana primary is just a few weeks away, followed by the general election in November.
Locally, Hoosiers will be voting on a new governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. They'll also be voting on all 100 Statehouse seats and half of the State Senate seats. Two issues Hoosier voters have expressed concern about are crime and affordable housing.
Rick Snyder, president of the Indianapolis Fraternal Order of Police, said an officer shortage is one of the main issues the city of Indianapolis faces.
"We can only do what we have the people to do," Snyder said.
That's the message the FOP hopes to convey with a billboard on Interstate 70, letting passersbys know that more police officers are needed.
According to IMPD, the city's budget funds 1,743 officers.
The department is now down 266 officers, at a time when the city has reinstituted a curfew for the city's youth, hoping to address the rise in juvenile homicides and shootings.
Snyder said part of the problem is a broken juvenile justice system in Marion County.
"Oftentimes when arrests are made of juvenile offenders, even for crimes of violence, they're not being detained or even accepted at the juvenile detention facility. So we've called for changes to be on that front," Snyder explained, saying the FOP also wants lawmakers to hold judges accountable.
Recently, the Indianapolis FOP spoke out after Elliahs Dorsey was sentenced to "time served" in the killing of IMPD officer Brean Leath.
"I think with recent court decisions that have occurred in Indianapolis, people on both sides of the aisle have come forward and said we need to put in some additional guardrails," Snyder said.
Despite statistics that show a double-digit drop in homicides over the last three years in Marion County, Synder calls that semantics.
"You're still exceeding 200 homicides. There's been a lot of attempts to play word games and semantics talking about criminal homicides versus non-criminal homicides. The point is still this, is that you have deaths that are occurring, and I think that anyone would agree that one is too many," Snyder said.
Homicides spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. So did home prices. But while homicides have been falling in recent years, housing costs in Indiana have climbed up more than 50% over the past five years.
Rental costs are up, too.
"There's something happening in Indiana that's out of step with the rest of the Midwest," said Andrew Bradley, the policy director with Prosperity Indiana, which works to provide affordable housing in communities across the state.
"We don't have enough supply of affordable and available housing," said Bradley, explaining that's in part because housing across the state has deteriorated because local government's can't enforce health and safety standards.
"In 2020, the Indiana General Assembly basically took away almost every tool from cities and towns to be able to strengthen housing health and safety standards on their own. That's something taken out of their hands, and this next set of policy makers could put it back," Bradley said.
Housing advocates have called on the current administration to appoint a commission on housing safety and affordability.
"Whether it's this governor or a future administration, that work needs to move forward if we're going to see solutions," Bradley said.
With an upcoming legislative budget session in 2025, Bradley said it's a chance to invest more state dollars in a housing trust fund to build more affordable housing.
"You need a safe and affordable place to live in order to be safe, in order to be safe from crime," Bradley said.
Bradley's advice to voters is to ask candidates what their plan is to address more affordable housing across the state.