When You Get Raped, Your Son is On Another T-Shirt, Don’t Cry When You Re-Elect Mears Again

Crooked Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears.

Opinion by David McCarthy, Operations Manager, Hoosier Enquirer

Marion County is going to re-elect Ryan Mears, then spend the next four years acting like the prosecutor’s office is some mystery force that just happens to them.

It is not. It is you.

Do not write in with the rape. Do not tell us about the murdered son, the robbery, the stabbing, the stolen car. Those stories are already public. The county has been swimming in them since Mears took the job in 2019, won it again in 2022, and started lining up the third term. If a stack of victim files were going to change this electorate, it would have happened already. It didn’t. You voted. You are about to vote again. Own the product.

Everybody not on the payroll knows the reputation: Ryan Mears protects criminals. Police have said it. The state FOP voted no confidence and he waved it off as a stunt. Neighboring counties have said Indianapolis dumps its mess on them. His former deputy, Philip Foust, is running against him on plea deals, juveniles, and an office that treats offenders like clients and everyone else like an inconvenience. Mears answers with press-conference math—90 percent on the murder trials he actually tries, falling homicides after the COVID peak—and expects you to confuse a stat sheet with a safe city. Indianapolis is still more violent than it has any right to be. Downtown still produces the cases that make the rest of Indiana point at this county and laugh. That is not a weather event. That is charging culture, plea culture, and a prosecutor who has had seven years to decide which side of the courtroom he works for.

You already know this. You just do not want the responsibility that comes with knowing it.

This is a Democratic county. The prosecutor’s race is a party office with a D next to the name. Mears has the money, the machine, and the habit vote. A GOP poll still had him ahead with a third of you “undecided,” which in Marion County means you will default to the incumbent and then howl when the next defendant walks on a deal you were too lazy to punish at the ballot box. Undecided is not thoughtful. Undecided is how bad offices get tenure.

Stop performing shock. If you put him back in, you are not “giving him another chance.” You are telling every cop, every shop owner, and every family that already buried someone that the revolving door is county policy. You are telling the rest of Indiana that Marion County prefers sermons about “smart on justice” to locking the door. You are telling Mears he can keep the brand, keep the speeches, and keep treating public safety like one item on a longer political résumé.

A wake-up call is simple. The prosecutor is not your therapist. He is the gate. He decides who gets charged, who gets the sweetheart paper, and who gets to try again on your street. You hired the gatekeeper. You are lining up to hire him again. That is not oppression. That is a preference.

So spare the candlelight and the comment-section grief. If Mears wins, the next case is not a tragedy that “never should have happened.” It is the bill for the vote you cast with your eyes open.

You get what you vote for. If that sentence offends you, good. It was supposed to. Now do something with it, or shut up when the next file hits the clerk’s office and the name on the letterhead is the same one you just re-elected.