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Council votes to address inequity, but hard part still ahead

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A special resolution signifying a commitment to address historical inequalities passed unanimously in the Indianapolis City-County Council, but that will likely prove to be the easy part.

The hard part ā€” going for substantive changes ā€” is still to come.

All members of the city-county council, which consists of 20 Democrats and five Republicans, are listed as sponsors on the proposal, but council President Vop Osili, a Democrat, admitted there may be some ā€œdifficult conversationsā€ and ā€œdifficult decisionsā€ on the horizon.

The special resolution, Proposal 85, creates a steering committee comprised of local leaders ā€” including Osili ā€” who participated in a workshop led by the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) in December 2019.

According to Osili, the committee has commitments from every city and county public agency to, as the proposal reads, ā€œuse available tools to assist in the elimination of racial and social disparities across key indicators of success, including health, education, criminal justice, the environment, employment and the economy.ā€

The committee then helps guide actions that are supposed to create a more equitable Indianapolis and, where necessary, fix systems created in the past that explicitly or implicitly maintain racial inequities.

ā€œThese disparities didnā€™t happen overnight,ā€ Osili said. ā€œThey wonā€™t go away overnight, but thereā€™s a commitment in our city and county to address them.ā€

Even as elected leaders on the city-county council decry the politicizing of crime and violence ā€” issues with deeply embedded and historical ties to racism ā€” there still appears to be a fair amount of gamesmanship to go around.

Republicans wanted to create a commission to study violence and its disparate impact on African Americans, but Democrats rejected it.

The city doesnā€™t need more data to know whatā€™s going on and how to address it, Democrats argued, so now itā€™s time to take action.

But it was unclear for a time what exactly that action was until councilor Leroy Robinson, a Democrat who chairs the councilā€™s Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee, told the Recorder about his plans for public safety.

Shortly after, there seemed to be some bipartisan agreement on creating a citizen-driven public safety initiative, but even that has fallen through since Democrats backed away because of a misunderstanding about what the initiative would entail.

While Osili understands he may have to change some minds in the coming months about what actions are appropriate based off the steering committeeā€™s recommendations, heā€™s hopeful a public commitment to addressing the issues will hold councilors and other leaders to account.

ā€œBecause weā€™ve made it a public commitment,ā€ he said, ā€œwe will follow through with it and hold ourselves to the standard of that commitment.ā€

Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.

Vop Osili speaks at a May 23, 2019, press conference at Horizon House about the 2019 Point-in-Time Count. (Recorder file photo)

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