INDIANAPOLIS — The City-County Council has allocated $2 million for architects to design a new IMPD North District Headquarters to be relocated to property owned by the Marion County Public Health Department northeast of the intersection of 38th Street and Keystone Avenue.
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Assistant Chief Michael Wolley previously served as the commander of North District in its present location at Washington Park.
“We don’t have a community space so there’s nowhere where we can hold a town hall or a community meeting or anything,” said Wolley of the current headquarters that is crowded, damp and moldy. ”We would have training facilities and training rooms for our officers, we would have spaces where they could possibly take a break. To be honest, we want a place where our cops and community are just proud of having.”
The new IMPD district would be built near the health department headquarters and a soon-to-be constructed IEMS base of operations in a move from its westside location.
”Right now we’re thinking it’s going to be positioned somewhere over near the Avondale Meadows YMCA,” said Wolley. “That area in general there’s a lot of bus stops, and there’s major thoroughfares on 38th Street and Keystone. It’s a little more centrally located within the north district.”
IMPD’s North District covers 74 square miles, stretching from the north side of downtown to 96th Street and out to the Geist area.
209,000 people live within the district where IMPD recorded one out of every five homicides that occurred in the city since the start of 2023.
”It certainly still sees some challenges with crime,” said Wolley, “but the overall hope and what you see the energy galvanizing around the area is just really tremendous.”
The Meadows, once home to a vibrant apartment community that took a downhill slide in the 1980s and was eventually demolished to make way for new housing, is bouncing back with the construction of the IndyGo Purple Line and the addition of recent business developments.
Junior Hugais of Phyre Smoke had the misfortune of opening his smoke shop not only in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic but also just as IndyGo broke ground on its bus rapid transit line along 38th Street, thereby cutting access to his store just as the doors opened.
”Now we can see the end goal to what they’re trying to do and we can see the end vision in what it’s gonna look like in the end and it kind of just gives us hope,” he said. ”If we start seeing more presence of the police, if we start seeing more community members just walking around, checking up on each other, I feel that’s what a community is, just checking up and making sure we’re all good. Whether it’s the police, whether it’s the community members, whether it’s the business, we all gotta come together.”
IMPD Chief Chris Bailey told FOX59/CBS4 that he hoped construction could begin on the new North District HQ by the end of next year.
