Letters: Great service from IMPD

Early on a recent morning, I walked outside, coffee in hand, and noticed something immediately wrong with the scene in front of our house: My car was gone. There’s a brief moment in which you hope that’s a mistake or a bad angle of perception. It wasn’t.

Fortunately, I have an app that tracks the vehicle, which confirmed that it had been stolen during the night and showed its location. It’s a strange thing in that moment to move from disbelief to digital certainty — watching something that should be stationary exist somewhere else entirely without you.

I called the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, and that began a series of interactions that in another context would simply be described as customer service.

I later met with three officers at the location where the vehicle had been recovered. Each of them was professional, patient, and genuinely helpful. They took the time to answer questions and guide me through what could have been a frustrating and disorienting process, treating the situation with care and respect rather than indifference or routine.

Officer Chelsea Jones was the one who initially took my report over the phone that morning. Her calm, steady manner immediately set a reassuring tone in a moment when that mattered a great deal.

The next day, Officer Jones came to our home and returned my wallet, credit cards and other personal items that had been taken. That kind of follow-through is not something I take for granted, and it made a lasting impression. It also reflects effort beyond the initial response — effort that is easy to overlook unless you are the one directly affected by it.

It’s easy these days to default to skepticism about institutions, especially from a distance. We tend to describe them in broad terms — systems, agencies, departments — as if they operate independently of the people inside them. Experiences like this run counter to that instinct. What we often call “systems” are, in practice, individuals showing up, making decisions and executing their work under real conditions.

In that sense, this felt less like interacting with an impersonal process and more like encountering a standard of customer service delivered in a public safety context — consistent, responsive, and attentive at exactly the moment it needed to be.

—Jeffrey Cohen