A Stranger in My House: Privacy, Protection and Public Safety

By Tori Calvert

I am a resident of Fountain Square. I am a renter. I am a daughter, sister, and aunt. I am also a law-abiding citizen who values family, community, safety, and privacy. I live with my sister, also a law-abiding citizen, and her one-year old daughter on Leonard Street.

On a recent Friday afternoon, a police officer dressed in street clothing entered my single-family residence without permission (the door was closed but not locked). My sister was home alone, and when she heard some commotion in the house, she walked out of the bathroom to find a male officer in our home and two officers, one female and one male, on our porch. An officer immediately asked her if she knew John Doe (name has been changed). She did not recognize the name and told him so. They curiously looked past her into our home as if to question her truthfulness, then showed her a photo and asked if she knew the person. She did recognize the person, and at this point the officers realized they were in the wrong house (whether or not they had authority to be in any house is unknown since they didn't offer that information) and abruptly turned and left, leaving our front gate open.

It is my understanding that the City of Indianapolis and Marion County officials use tax dollars to employ law enforcement officers who are trained in public safety. I do not have any sense of increased safety, and in fact, I feel much less safe than I did before this incident. I now worry that an officer can enter my home at any time with or without reason, and I am helpless to stop him or her. I feel unsettled knowing that some law enforcement officers patrolling or working in my neighborhood while armed with deadly weapons are not thorough enough to identify which houses they have authority to enter. I feel sad that I am left wondering if IMPD officers are trained to apologize when they've made a mistake that has disrupted the lives of the citizens they have sworn to protect.

This incident has also caused me to question the dynamics of my community. Am I the minority in feeling so violated? Has this happened to other people who had the same feelings of helplessness and were afraid to speak up? Are there characteristics attributable to me and my neighbors that make us susceptible to this behavior?

But I am also hopeful. I have faith that decent residents and police officers in my neighborhood can work together to improve community policing practices. I dream of the day uniformed officers walk by my home and wave to my niece, possibly stopping at my fence to ask about my concerns. And at the very least, I hope to be part of a local government system in which I’m not told that officers were “doing their job” when I retell this story to the Citizens' Police Complaint Office, a system in which police officers do not disrespect the privacy of law-abiding citizens and do apologize when they make mistakes.