From the 2005 State of the City Address — Bart Peterson

"I have fought hard to improve public safety in our city and our successes have been notable. For example, violent crime in the Indianapolis Police Department service territory is much lower than when I took office, and in 2004 was at its lowest level in 16 years. But non-violent crime has been trending steadily upward."

That, folks, is right from the horse's, er um, 'mouth.' What follows is a chart from INDIANAPOLIS VIOLENCE REDUCTION PARTNERSHIP NEWS April 2005, which is what we call 'factual data' (not to be confused with 'the crap Bart makes up').

Where does he get the CURRENT campaign rhetoric about 'significantly reduced' crime? Where does he get the the nerve to lie to us by saying violent crime is 'down?' When you look at the chart, you can easily see the most-violent crime of all - homicide - went UP after Bart's first year, when it was 'just' 103 dead bodies.

You won't find any more details by going to http://www.indygov.org/ivrp, as the IVRP report suggests. The only thing there is a 'Mission Statement. '

Another interesting document is Strategic Approaches to Reducing Firearms Violence: Final Report on the Indianapolis Violence Reduction Partnership published in January 2004. It DOES show large decreases in violent crime (through April 4, 2000), which (except for 3 months) predates Bart's tenure as Mayor.

IVRP seems to have ceased operation after the April 2004 'final report.' That's too bad, as there seemed to be good things happening. But then Bart's 2nd term as mayor started. C'est la vie.

Now, we move on to IDecide local Information Server, which provides several summary 'slices' on crime in Indianapolis. This shows us that, overall, violent crime has gone down in Indiana. But then there's Indianapolis, which is a whole 'nuther ballgame.

For Indiana

For Indianapolis alone:

Violent Crime Rate (by year) for Indianapolis (click to view details)
• 2001 931
• 2002 935
• 2003 883
• 2004 883
• 2005 993

That doesn't say 'much lower' to me. Violent crime has not been 'reduced' at all! It has gone up since Bart took the reins. And not only that, we are blowing the national averages out of the water.

FBI Statistics for 2006

According to the FBI 2006 FINAL uniform crime report:

800,969

State	City		Population1	Violent crime	Murder	For- cible rape	Rob- bery	Aggravated assault	Property crime	Burglary	Larceny- theft	Motor vehicle theft	Arson2
INDIANA	INDIANAPOLIS	2005	800,304	7,948	108	527	3,274	4,039	50,081	11.548	29,541	8,992	374
		2006		7,689	140	549	3,249	3,751	49,599	11,734	28,929	8,936	347
Pct Chg			0.08%	-3.26%	29.63%	4.17%	-0.76%	-7.13%	-0.96%	1.61%	-2.07%	-0.62%	-7.22%

Yes, you can crow about 'reducing crime' but the numbers show the fact is 'not much'. And MURDER went up.