IMPD Officer-Involved Sexual Assault

Women4Change Indiana Statement on IMPD Sexual Assault Incident 

Chief Taylor, it was sexual assault.

A video posted on Sunday night shows a member of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department groping the breast of an unarmed black woman at the corner of North Pennsylvania and East Washington streets in downtown Indianapolis. When the woman struggles away from the officer’s grasp, multiple officers begin violently beating her with batons. As she moves to the ground, the officers pin her head and body to the pavement. 

There is no world in which these actions, and the clearly visceral response they provoked in the woman assaulted, do not constitute sexual assault. Women4Change condemns the actions of the police officers involved in the incident and calls for transparency in its investigation, as well as a transparent and thorough trial on behalf of the woman assaulted. 

Indiana Code Title 35 Criminal Law and Procedure § 35-42-4-8 defines sexual battery as “touch[ing] another person when that person is compelled to submit to the touching by force or the imminent threat of force,” conditions that the officers involved certainly meet. Sexual battery is a Level 6 felony and is raised to a Level 4 felony when “it is committed while armed with a deadly weapon.”  

Indiana citizens cannot trust their criminal justice system until it is willing to recognize acts like these for what they are: blatant, violent instances of sexual assault that should be charged as such. Women4Change will continue to push for more comprehensive sexual assault legislation in Indiana, including a definition for consent, in order to expand legal protections for victims of incidents such as this one.  

“Although Black women are routinely killed, raped, and beaten by the police, their experiences are rarely foregrounded in popular understandings of police brutality,” notes professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw of Columbia Law School. Women4Change refuses to sit back as the experience of another Black woman is silenced. We stand by the victim of this egregious assault, and ask that IMPD and the Indiana criminal justice system treat the events of Sunday night with the gravity and urgency they deserve.