Republican candidate Cyndi Carrasco announces run for Marion County prosecutor
A longtime state attorney who led probes into white-collar crime under former Gov. Mike Pence and recently worked as general counsel to Gov. Eric Holcomb has a new goal for public office: to become the Marion County prosecutor.
Cyndi Carrasco, 41, announced her bid for the office Tuesday with months to go until both parties hold May primaries. Indiana's general elections, which will decide who helms the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office among other local and state positions, will take place in November. Carrasco will campaign as a Republican, and has already received backing from the Marion County Republican Party.
In an interview with IndyStar, Carrasco, a daughter of Mexican immigrants who received her law degree from Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in 2006, lamented the city’s upward trend in homicides. In 2021, Indianapolis totaled 249 criminal homicides, eclipsing the previous all-time record of 214 criminal homicides in 2020.
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“The last two, three years of the city's public safety crisis has just gotten worse and worse,” Carrasco said. “I came to the decision that all of the skills that I've learned at the state level and all my years of public service, I needed to bring those and bring them home to make my community better.”
Carrasco led the State Ethics Commission for just over eight years starting in 2006, where she focused on corruption and government fraud. In 2015, then-Gov. Mike Pence appointed her Inspector General. Her office investigated white-collar crime and worked with local prosecutors.
Holding a local role dedicated to going after violent crime would be new for her, but she says she already has a “laundry list” of ideas she would try to pursue as prosecutor.
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“I would start with building relationships with all those critical stakeholders, all of the community stakeholders that are very much interested in trying to help curb our public safety crisis,” Carrasco said.
Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears, a Democrat who will run for re-election this year, announced shortly after he took office in 2019 that prosecutors would not be filing criminal charges against individuals who are detained or summonsed for possessing less than one ounce of marijuana.
He told reporters the decision was meant to free up more resources that could be put toward prosecuting violent crimes like murder and sexual assault.
More: Marion County will no longer prosecute simple marijuana possession, officials say
Carrasco says she wouldn’t follow Mears’ blanket approach to policies on minor drug possession, or any other criminal violation.
“I'm not going to make categorical decisions to ignore certain laws because I do not believe that's the prosecutors job,” she said. “The prosecutors job is to enforce the law on a case by case basis with a common sense approach.”
Carrasco also weighed in on the controversy surrounding low-level criminal defendants on community monitoring in Marion County. In December, top judges with the Marion Superior Court decided to end their support for The Bail Project, a national non-profit which provides bail for low-income individuals awaiting trial in Indianapolis. They cited a lack of data on defendants supported by the program, according to a letter judges sent to The Bail Project that was obtained by IndyStar.
Around the same time, a group of Republican state senators representing the Indianapolis metropolitan area announced a package of bills for this year’s legislative session that would effectively end surety bonds for violent crime defendants, and up the oversight of individuals on pretrial supervision.
More: Republican worries crime bills package targeting Indianapolis is ‘zeroing in on the poor’
“I know that there's a variety of bills that have been filed by the Marion County Senators who have been working with community stakeholders,” Carrasco said. “I appreciate their effort in trying to make a change, because (our) status quo isn't working.”
Court officials who spoke about the bills at a recent state Senate committee hearing said 85% of the 1,475 people on pretrial monitoring in Marion County have not committed a new offense. It was also reported that 12 of the 238 homicide suspects identified by law enforcement between March 2018 and February 2020 were on post-conviction monitoring, according to data from Marion County Community Corrections.
Turning to the 2021 FedEx shooting, Carrasco said she supports using Indiana’s red flag law as a tool to deter violent crime in the city.
Mears became the target of local and national criticism last year after he announced his office did not open a red flag petition in court against the man who fatally shot eight people at a FedEx facility in southwest Indianapolis last April.
‘Indiana is an accessory to murder’: Failure to enforce red flag laws ended in 14 deaths
The gunman was the target of a law enforcement intervention that removed a shotgun from him under the state’s red flag law in March 2020. Had prosecutors followed that removal with a court petition, it may have suspended the gunman’s right to own a firearm and prevented him from legally purchasing the two AR-15 style rifles he used during the FedEx tragedy, which stands as the worst mass shooting in the city’s history.
“This is a preventative tool that you can use to help curb our public safety crisis,” Carrasco said. “If I have the honor of being Marion County prosecutor, I am going to ensure that every single case is filed so that I can say I've done everything I can to try.”
IndyStar reporter Lawrence Andrea contributed.
Call IndyStar courts reporter Johnny Magdaleno at 317-273-3188 or email him at jmagdaleno@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @IndyStarJohnny
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Marion County prosecutor: GOP candidate Cyndi Carrasco announces run
