Hundreds of violent protestors descended on downtown Chicago early Monday following a police shooting on the city’s South Side. Looters smashed the windows of dozens of businesses and made off with merchandise, cash machines, and anything else they could carry.
Indianapolis Fraternal Order of Police President Rick Snyder told the Hammer and Nigel show Monday that a similar scenario could play out in Indianapolis due to the unprecedented lack of accountability from our city’s leadership.
“When [city officials] have made clear that they will not hold accountable those who are committing criminal acts, it will only embolden those who do harm and want to inflict harm on our community,” said Snyder. “And so lawlessness follows the path of least resistance and it is why we charge our elected officials with their number one responsibility, which is supposed to be the safety of the public.”
He continued: “And this is what we went to Washington D.C. with back in December of last year. We met with the President and told him, ‘This is what we are seeing in on the horizon for all our major cities across the nation.’ That [situation] got exacerbated by everything that has transpired in 2020. Major cities are reaping what they’ve sown.”
Snyder said the lessons learned in the wake of the violent and destructive riots in downtown Indianapolis is that local officials are an impedance to law enforcement doing their job.
“Our local officials failed us,” said Snyder. “They failed to provide direction and they actually interrupted our normal procedures for how to quell such violent actions.”
Synder cautioned that the city of Indianapolis is vulnerable to the type of violence seen in Seattle, Portland, and most recently, Chicago due to elected officials’ unwillingness to allow law enforcement to do their job.
“Our police can prevent the violence [from happening here], but our elected officials prevented that from occurring before,” Snyder said.
He continued: “Just look at what’s been going on here locally in the city of Indianapolis. We have downtown businesses that were destroyed and have yet to hear from [Mayor Joe Hogsett]. Many of these businesses are on life support. We have a salon that just announced their closure over the weekend, and they said they never would have dreamed that their beloved downtown Indianapolis would have ended up like this. They specified that a violent riot and an infested, empty downtown ended their dream.”
Longtime Monument Circle business Studio 2000 Salon & Day Spa announced it was closing its doors after 30 years due to the pandemic-related business downturn and the deterioration of downtown Indianapolis.
“Rioters smashed store windows, looted goods and burned many of our fellow neighboring businesses, all live on television,” the owners said in a letter announcing the closure. “This damaged the psyche of the residents, workers, and shoppers in downtown. Countless clients have told us they are afraid to come downtown. Our beautiful Monument Circle has become a haven for a group of drug users and mentally ill people who are aggressively pursuing our staff and customers, defecating on the sidewalks and the alleyways, openly dealing and using drugs while driving customers out of downtown.”
The owners of Studio 2000 Salon & Day Spa also expressed their frustration with city leadership.
“We all expressed our concern on all of the above issues that are ruining our chances to stay in business and asked for a plan to help downtown recover from this trauma,” the owners said. “Nothing materialized. The Mayor’s office, Indianapolis Downtown, Visit Indy and Keep Indianapolis Beautiful have taken too long to act. They have no plan to help retailers, except they are launching a $1 million advertising campaign to encourage people to visit downtown Indianapolis. Yet, the aforementioned problems will still greet them.”
FOP President Rick Snyder said law enforcement across the country is frustrated by politicians’ reluctance to take action.
“In Chicago, the police commissioner openly stated, ‘Our city is going to be held hostage by people committing violence.’ “Now he has publically sworn that he’s not going to allow that to happen, yet it just did last weekend,” Snyder said.
“And the residents of our communities had better wake up and realize that when there is nothing left downtown to loot, to burn, and to destroy,” warned Snyder, “it’s going to move out from there [into the suburbs] – just like our crime has done.”
Click below to hear Hammer and Nigel’s full interview with FOP President Rick Snyder.
https://omny.fm/shows/hammer-and-nigel-show/fop-president-rick-snyder-talks-riots
