Jill Disis and Bill McCleery

The gunfire was over almost as soon as it started.

One minute, the man was talking with people inside a red car.

The next, police said, he began shooting — prompting two officers to jump from an unmarked police car nearby, guns at the ready.

When the man didn’t comply with ­police commands, the officers fired.

Suspect down. Incident over.

The operation early Tuesday in the 1300 block of West Pruitt Street wasn’t like others the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has conducted in the past. This time, the responding officers were not from the department’s ­patrol units.

They were members of IMPD’s new full-time SWAT force — a tactical change that is here to stay, Chief Rick Hite said.

“It’s a more direct approach to support the mission of the district commanders in each of the districts they’re assigned to,” Hite said. “They’re targeting those violent offenders in those areas where we have violent crime.”

In the past, the city’s SWAT team operated on a callout basis, suiting up specifically to deal with dangerous situations such as crowd violence or armed suspects barricaded inside buildings.

The full-time SWAT team, with about a dozen members, has a different mission: to seek out and neutralize violent offenders.

That objective, said IMPD Lt. Chris Bailey, means the heavily armed SWAT officers are often “working with district personnel to identify hot areas and ­conduct covert investigations.” When the suspect in Tuesday’s incident opened fire, Bailey said, SWAT ­officers were already there watching the neighborhood because of multiple reports of shots fired in recent days.

The SWAT officers usually wear the IMPD uniform but also may work as plainclothes officers. They sometimes serve arrest warrants and search warrants. The ­department will work out the scope of the effort over the next few months.

The anti-crime plan, fully operational since last month, has the blessing of top city officials, from Mayor Greg Ballard to Public Safety Director Troy Riggs. It has other components, as well: community meetings in neighborhoods within 72 hours after a shooting; close monitoring of people with a history of violence; careful tracking of robbery felons recently released from prison.

The permanent members are getting a hand from about 35 part-time SWAT team members, Bailey said.

Although full-time SWAT teams are not commonly seen across the country — about 85 percent of law enforcement agencies don’t have one, according to the National Tactical Officers Association — they are a staple in some of the nation’s biggest cities, such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Last month’s move, Riggs said, takes Indianapolis — the 13th-most populous city in the country — a step closer toward acknowledging its place among those cities.

“We are a major city,” he said, “and most major cities have a full-time SWAT team.”

Such beefed-up SWAT teams have not always been met with praise.

Last month, the Ameri­can Civil Liberties Union released a report condemning “hyper-aggressive” tactics sometimes used by police SWAT teams.

“American policing has become unneces­sarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight,” the organization wrote in its study.

The ACLU study, which analyzed more than 800 SWAT deployments conducted by 20 law ­enforcement agencies in 2011 and 2012, said the “militarization of policing encourages officers to adopt a ‘warrior’ mentality and think of the people they are supposed to serve as enemies.”

Jane Henegar, executive director of the ACLU of Indiana, said the report recommends that government entities develop criteria for SWAT raids that limit their deployment to the kinds of emergencies for which they were intended, such as an active shooter situation, and track the use of SWAT to make sure it is used appro­priately.

“The work of law ­enforcement must be done in an atmosphere that protects our safety, as well as our rights and freedoms as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution,” Henegar said.

Hite, however, said he fully supports his department’s new initiative: “The drawback is, the bad guys can’t go out there and commit the crimes — the violent crimes — like they used to.”

Although it’s too early to know whether the new SWAT program will have a lasting effect, Riggs said officials already are seeing a reduction in violent crime.

According to a count of violent incidents from June 8 to July 5, IMPD ­recorded a nearly 17 percent reduction in rob­beries and a nearly 11 percent ­reduction in aggravated assaults compared with the previous 28-day period. IMPD tallies crime incident reports in 28-day periods.

“Can we say there’s a direct correlation with adding SWAT team and (other patrols) out there? It’s hard to tell right now,” Riggs said. “But there are some promising numbers.”

Although Riggs thinks the permanent SWAT team can help mitigate ­violence in the city, it’s not the team’s only purpose.

“There are two main goals: One, to increase ­citizen safety,” Riggs said. “Also, to increase ­officer safety.”

Since last September, IMPD has seen two of its own killed in the line of ­duty, including IMPD veteran patrolman Perry Renn, who was fatally shot July 5 while respond­ing to reports that shots had been fired near East 34th Street and Forest Manor Avenue.

During that same pe­riod, six other officers were injured in shootings. Four of them were SWAT officers, all injured while raiding a house southeast of Fountain Square in early March.

“These were four ­highly trained SWAT officers with the best gear money can buy,” Riggs said. “What would have happened if we had four officers, well-trained and well-equipped, but not for those types of tactical ­situations?”

Star reporter Justin Mack contributed to this story.

Call Star reporter Jill Disis at (317) 444-6137. Follow her on Twitter: @jdisis.