All right, welcome everybody to the criminal justice planning council meeting on September 15th of 2025.

My name is Ryan Mears.

I'm the Marion County Prosecutor and also board chair.

I'd like to start by doing an introduction.

So we could start with the council president.

Yes, good afternoon, Bob Osley.

Um President of the City Council and Council of District 12.

Good afternoon, Mr.

Chairman Leeroy Robinson, District 1, City County Council.

Controller Abby Hansen.

Sheriff Kerry Forstall.

Scott Hall, executive director of Marion County Committee Corrections.

Bailey Renchi, Board Counsel from Office of Corporation Council.

Well, thank you.

And I see that we have prepared the uh minutes from the previous meeting.

Uh as everybody had an opportunity to review the meet uh the minutes.

And do I have a motion?

Move to accept.

Okay.

We have a motion that it has been seconded to approve the uh meeting minutes.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

All right.

Uh that's a unanimous approval.

And from that, uh I'd like to move on to the new business today, which is the blue envelope program.

Uh joining us to introduce and have a conversation about the blue envelope program is one of my good friends and co-workers, Natalie Miller from the Marion County Prosecutor's Office, as well as Kim Dotson from the Arc of Indiana.

And this is a program that we feel very fortunate to be a part of.

This is something that Natalie has spearheaded and put a lot of time, energy, and effort into.

Uh, but as always, we couldn't do this without tremendous partnerships in the community.

And so if our community partners and Natalie could come forward so we could have a discussion about the blue envelope program.

Floor is yours, Ms.

Miller.

Okay, thank you.

Well, thank you, everyone, for allowing us to be here today.

My name is Natalie Miller.

I'm constituent services coordinator at the Marion County Prosecutor's Office.

I have worked here for nine and a half years, and I am co-founder and director of our different not less initiative program, which has been centered on disability advocacy and opportunity within Marion County.

And Blue Envelope has been our newest installment of that.

What a little background information.

What Blue Envelope is is a program that distributes this, a blue envelope to drivers with disabilities to as a convenient place to put all the things you might need in a traffic stop in order.

That way, if they're pulled over by the police, it streamlines the process.

So they don't have to go rummaging through the glove compartment to find everything.

And it also communicates to the officer that they have a disability.

It's a place where they can list their medical accommodations and any considerations they might have.

This alerts the officer hey, this driver has a disability and may not react to certain stimuli like the bright lights and the layering sirens the same way the average person might because this with many disabilities is the comes the difficulty to process stimuli or communicate things in a high stress situation, which traffic stops are can be quite stressful, especially if you do not know why you are being pulled over.

And unfortunately, to the untrained eye, these reactions can come off as seeming like the person is acting out intentionally trying to be violent and or that they're intoxicated, and this can lead to some very unfortunate consequences and make these stops way more difficult than they have to be.

So we're hoping that by simply having these and opening that channel of communication, it would make driving around to get to work to get to the store home, wherever a person might need to go, a lot safer.

We launched this in April of this year, so fairly recently.

He was on board right away.

And so far, we have distributed 543 envelopes.

And included with the agendas today are these maps that I've designed.

This shows all the cities and towns across the state of Indiana where the envelopes have been distributed so far.

Cities and towns have been color-coded by how many have been requested.

A red dot in the middle of Marion County, predictably is Indianapolis.

And from this, you can clearly see the requests have been largely concentrated in or near the Indianapolis area, with Fort Wayne being the primary outlier.

And I think this is a local agency, I think this speaks to how much how important good public policy and public safety is in Indian, not just to Indianapolis citizens, but people statewide.

We are the capital of Indiana.

We produce a lot of the state's income.

We have people coming in here to work.