The Sunday Post - October 11, 2026: What Our Officers Do Not Have, A Map Worth Bookmarking, and Breaking Bread
A weekly report from Councilor Michael-Paul Hart — Building the Smartest City in America.
Volume 2, Issue 41
What Our Officers Do Not Have
This week I sat down with IMPD leadership to talk about health and wellness for our officers and professional staff. I asked for the meeting because I wanted to better understand what we are doing today, what is missing, and what the department needs.
Here is why this matters, and I am going to put it as plainly as I can.
Keeping officers healthy means keeping more officers on the street. When someone gets hurt, we need to help them recover and get back to work. We also need to do more on the front end to keep people healthy in the first place.
That matters when we are already hundreds of officers short. (We budget for 1,743 Officers)
It matters for recruitment too. We are competing for people. If the benefits, facilities, and support we offer are not competitive, hiring is only going to get harder.
I made an observation during the meeting that I have made before. When I visit IMPD facilities, I see a lot of hand-me-down furniture and equipment. Too often it feels like we ask our police department to make do with whatever is available instead of giving them the tools and facilities we would build from scratch today.
One of the clearest examples is health and wellness.
IMPD does not have a dedicated health and wellness center. There is fitness equipment at different police facilities, donated by Planet Fitness instead of being thrown away, but that is not the same thing as having a dedicated facility with the space, equipment, rehabilitation, and programming built around officer health.
Our firefighters do have that kind of resource, with programming provided through Pro Team Tactical.
I want to be clear: that is not a criticism of IFD. I am glad our firefighters have it. It is good for them, and it is good for the city.
I think our police officers deserve that same level of investment.
The City is working on a health and wellness center for IMPD. I support building it, and I have said so.
My frustration is the timeline. Like too many projects outside of downtown, it is taking too long.
See What's Being Proposed in Your Neighborhood
This week the City briefed me on HEA 1001, a new state law covering permitting, reporting, and housing development. The good news is Indianapolis was already meeting most of the requirements.
But I want to share something useful that came out of the conversation.
The Department of Metropolitan Development has a public Zoning Case Viewer where you can see active rezoning requests, variances, and other land use cases across Marion County.
I talk a lot about getting involved in development decisions early, but I also recognize it hasn't always been easy to know what is being proposed near you.
This tool makes that easier. I encourage you to bookmark it and check your neighborhood occasionally. It is much better to have a say before a decision is made than find out afterward.
I am also spending more time on housing policy, particularly how we increase our housing supply in Marion County. I will have more to share on that soon.
Breaking Bread Together
On Tuesday night I was part of Breaking Bread Together, and I was able to join a private breakfast as well.
It is a national initiative hosted by David Beasley, the former Governor of South Carolina and former Executive Director of the World Food Programme. The idea is to put leaders with genuinely different perspectives in one room and have an honest conversation, rather than a panel where everyone already agrees.
In Indianapolis, that room was leaders from business, healthcare, education, agriculture, government and the community, and the subject was food and nutrition security. I met the leadership at Elanco and people from every corner of this city I would not have met otherwise.
I should tell you why I said yes to this one.
I grew up getting our food from food banks. My mother volunteered at a food bank three days a week for as long as I can remember, right up until she passed. So when people talk about food insecurity, I am not hearing an abstraction. I am hearing my childhood.
The format was built around capturing ideas rather than delivering speeches. Moderators recorded what came out of the conversations, and they are compiling all of it into a document specific to Indianapolis that comes back to the group in a few weeks.
I will be honest about my one worry. This city does not have a shortage of good documents. I went because the subject matters to me personally, and I intend to stay in it long enough to find out whether anything in that document actually gets built.
A Timely Visit to Common Ground
By coincidence, I was invited to visit Common Ground at Faith just two days after sitting in a
room full of community leaders discussing food and nutrition security in Indianapolis.
We had spent time talking about what solutions could look like, and here I was visiting an organization already doing some of that work.
During the visit, I met Arin, who helps lead the effort, and learned more about what they are doing and where they could use some help. https://www.commongroundatfaith.org/blog/
My biggest takeaway was that I knew a few people who could be helpful, so I started making introductions.
That is a big part of what I do as a councilor. Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is connect people who are working toward the same goals but haven't met yet.
Reading of the Names
On Wednesday I attended the annual Reading of the Names for Indianapolis firefighters at Local 416 on Massachusetts Avenue.
It is always an honor to take a few minutes out of the day for this one. The names are read, and the families are there, and you are reminded what this service costs.
Thank you to our firefighters and to their families for what they give this city.
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