SOUTH BEND, Ind. — On a Tuesday in March, just after Pete Buttigieg began to catch fire with Democrats nationally, he flew home for his final State of the City address.
Buttigieg, the two-term mayor, drew more than 40 rounds of applause as he described the “comeback decade” in South Bend, pointing to new businesses and apartments downtown and the demolition of hundreds of blighted houses.
He had far less to say about his city’s Police Department: He devoted nearly as much time to it as he did to South Bend’s “smart sewers.”
But out of the spotlight, public safety was about to get worse. Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18% during the first seven months of 2019 compared with the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city’s violent crime rate is double the average for U.S. cities its size.
Policing problems in South Bend came to national attention June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer’s body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others.
It is the great paradox of Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy: His record on public safety and policing, once largely a footnote in his political biography, has overshadowed his economic record in South Bend, which he had spent years developing as a calling card for higher office.
“When he came in, the goal was to help turn the city around. That had nothing to do with the Police Department,” said Kareemah Fowler, until recently the South Bend city clerk.
Buttigieg’s image as a young, results-oriented executive continues to make him popular with many upper-income white liberals. They have delivered an overflowing war chest to his campaign: He had the best recent fundraising quarter of any Democrat in the race, pulling in $24.8 million.
But criticism of Buttigieg’s oversight of the police has damaged his viability as a Democratic presidential candidate, given the huge influence of black voters in choosing the party’s nominee. He has slipped in the polls in recent months, from double-digit poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire in the spring to the single digits more recently. In a recent Fox News poll, he earned less than 1% support from black Democratic primary voters.
Buttigieg continues to draw large crowds, and a strong performance in the next debate or the army of field staff he has hired in early primary states could improve his standing in the race. And he has tried to highlight other issues, campaigning on the urgency of the climate crisis, a proposal to revive rural economies and for mental health and addiction services.
In a campaign swing through New Hampshire last weekend, however, voters readily expressed concern about how the police issues reflected on Buttigieg’s qualifications.
“If he couldn’t corral a 100-member Police Department, how will he corral the Defense and State departments,’’ said Len Gleich, 72, who heard the mayor in Hanover, New Hampshire.
A Dartmouth student, Eowyn Pak, 20, said she was a Buttigieg supporter but was disappointed he did not speak to how he’d unite the country given the racial divisions in his hometown. “If one took a gander at the audience in that room today, it would become apparent that Buttigieg lacks minority following and support,’’ she said, referring to the virtually all-white crowd at his event.
In a recent interview, Buttigieg said his handling of South Bend’s policing controversies are “certainly something I have to speak to” on the campaign trail. But he rejected the idea that he neglected issues of crime and policing until a crisis arose. He said that among the major priorities of his first term — “the things that are on the whiteboard when we have our strategy meetings’’ — an effort to reduce gun violence was in the top three.
“If nothing else, hopefully it will come across that among the candidates, I’ll be one of those who has engaged these issues and the challenge that they represent,” Buttigieg said. “This is not a specialty or back-burner issue for me. It’s been so central for our community and the people I serve.”
Since the shooting two months ago, Buttigieg has pursued damage control on two fronts: an earnest willingness to embrace his critics, and a characteristically technocratic search for a policy response.
He has laid out a “Douglass Plan” to address historic wrongs against African Americans, including “a fundamentally racist criminal justice system.”
He attended protest marches and town halls at home, where the anger of some minority residents lashed against him like a breakwater.
While welcoming new police recruits the week after the shooting — all six of them white — Buttigieg lectured that their uniform came with a burden.
“In our past and present, we have seen innumerable moments in which racial injustice came at the hands of those trusted with being instruments of justice,” the mayor said.
But eloquently describing a history of injustice and showing empathy for its victims have yet to improve trust in the police, according to black critics and supporters of the mayor in South Bend, a city of about 100,000 in northern Indiana.
When pressed at the first Democratic debate in June about why just 6% of South Bend police officers were black, in a city where 26% of the residents are black, Buttigieg confessed, “Because I couldn’t get it done.”
A rise in violent crime
During Buttigieg’s first term as mayor, from 2012 through 2015, reports of total violent crime were relatively stable, although the number of homicides rose after he took office.
In his second term, though, reports of violent crimes rose sharply, according to FBI and South Bend records. The increase was almost entirely from aggravated assaults, one of four offenses that comprise the FBI’s main violent crime category. Buttigieg’s aides said the increase was because of changes in how violent crime data was classified and reported, which they said have significantly overstated crime trends.
In 2016, the South Bend police changed their definition of aggravated assault at the urging of the FBI to include a wider number of crimes, said Mark Bode, the city’s communications director. Reported aggravated assaults more than doubled that year. The FBI’s national crime report for 2016 noted that because of the changes, the city’s crime data was not comparable to previous years.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, cautioned that the data reporting changes made it difficult to render a judgment about violent crime overall during Buttigieg’s time in office. And aggravated assaults are a less reliable category for depicting trends, he said.
Still, even accounting for the changes implemented in 2016, the city’s violent crime rate has been rising lately, according to city data.
“I’ve not seen any acknowledgment from the mayor that our violent crime has increased substantially” over the past year or so, said Ricky Klee, a former City Council candidate who has written blog posts critical of the mayor.
“He’s made statements that have been vague, inaccurate or misleading,” Klee said.
Buttigieg, in the interview, denied those criticisms. “We adopted every best practice we know about in order to drive down violent crime,’’ he said. “What I wish I could do is do something about guns. In the state of Indiana, that’s obviously challenging.’’
Buttigieg said he believed violent crime and murder rates in South Bend were comparable to cities with similar poverty rates and other characteristics. He also said an increase could be explained by residents trusting the police and reporting more crimes.
The mayor argued that homicide rates were a more appropriate yardstick than overall violent crime, because virtually all murders are reported, whereas other crime data include statistical “noise’’ that he said makes it impossible to scrutinize trends or to compare with national averages.
“The thing we pay most attention to and the thing I worry most about is the murder rate,’’ he said.
Since Buttigieg took office in January 2012, there were 100 homicides through the end of 2018 — an increase of about 30% from the seven years before he became mayor. That does not include 10 homicides in the first seven months of this year, a number that has already topped last year’s total of nine, which was the lowest since 2013.
On another front, minority police hiring, South Bend under Buttigieg took a step in reverse.
There are now just 15 black officers in the Police Department, down from 29 in 2012, according to city data and local news reports. The city has recruited just two new black officers since April 2017, compared with 20 white officers. City data released to The New York Times show some black applicants were rejected after a prepolygraph interview and a written test.
Turnover at the top
Although there is a national shortage of police candidates, critics said South Bend’s problems have been exacerbated by the mayor, who made a series of decisions on personnel and police discipline that sowed mistrust and failed to stabilize the department.
In Buttigieg’s first months in office, he demoted the city’s first black police chief, Darryl Boykins, which the mayor acknowledged damaged relations between the police and minorities for years.
Buttigieg said he demoted the chief after learning that the FBI was investigating the Police Department for taping officers’ phone calls. Rumors flew that white officers had been recorded making racial slurs.
The tapes have never been released, because the officers who were recorded sued to keep them private, and the case remains tied up in court.
Buttigieg replaced Boykins with a white police chief, Ron Teachman, who he recruited from a department in Massachusetts.
Like the mayor, Teachman had a reputation as a technocrat, interested in technology and academic approaches to crime solving.
But the hiring of an outside chief proved unpopular with some in the department.
“Morale went down with all officers,” said Davin Hackett, an officer who quit the department in 2017. Hackett was one of three black officers who filed lawsuits in 2016 and 2017 charging racial discrimination under Teachman and his successor, Scott Ruszkowski, who is also white.
“A lot of minority officers left,” Hackett said in an interview.
Hackett claimed in his lawsuit that he was twice denied promotions in favor of less qualified whites. His case was dismissed by summary judgment in July. One of the other officers’ cases was also dismissed summarily, and the third officer reached a settlement with the city.
Early in Teachman’s tenure in 2013, the Indiana State Police were called in to investigate a complaint that the chief failed to assist a fellow officer in breaking up a fight outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Center.
The chief had remained inside the center when told of the fight and was untruthful to the lead state investigator, according to Patrick Cottrell, who at the time was president of South Bend’s Board of Public Safety, an oversight body for the police.
The five-member board, reviewing the state police report, was divided on whether Teachman should be fired. Buttigieg, who alone had the ability to fire a chief, determined no disciplinary action was merited.
That angered Cottrell, a retired police officer. He resigned from the oversight board in protest over Buttigieg’s decision.
“I told him he had a chance to do the right thing, and he didn’t do it,” Cottrell said in an interview. “I had no respect for him.”
In response, Buttigieg said the episode “had more to do with interpersonal politics than public safety.”
Discipline within the department increased substantially under Teachman, the mayor said. From 2014 to 2017, reported use of force incidents dropped by 35%, according to city data.
“I think in the long run that will serve us well,’’ the mayor said.
In any event, after two years, Teachman left to work in private industry.
His successor, Ruszkowski, was a South Bend native with many years on the force. “He was popular in the minority community and among the police force,” said Fowler, the city clerk, who is black. “What the mayor did was he granted their wishes.”
‘A lot of people are angry’
At a City Council meeting after the Eric Logan shooting, Buttigieg listed multiple efforts by his administration to improve trust between the police and residents. They included rerouting patrols to keep officers in the same neighborhoods consistently, allowing residents to file online complaints about the police and spending $1.5 million on body cameras.
Minority residents and officials, including supporters of the mayor and chief, said the current anger had far deeper roots than just the Logan shooting, which occurred when an officer responded to a report of a person breaking into cars downtown.
“A lot of people are angry and hurt, but the issues didn’t just start under Mayor Pete,” said Sharon McBride, a black member of the City Council, known as the Common Council. Buttigieg “talked about fixing the heart before you can branch out to the rest of the body,” she recalled about his policy priorities. Today, “the downtown is great,” she said. “But did we do enough in the minority community? Absolutely not.”
The Logan shooting revived memories of troubling police behavior in past years, some of which did not draw serious punishment.
In 2012, three white officers entered the home of Deshawn Franklin, a black teenager asleep in his bed, and subdued him with punches and a stun gun. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. A jury found the officers guilty of violating the Franklin family’s civil rights. But it awarded them just $18, which activists called a slap in the face.
Two of the same officers later pressured a convenience store clerk with a mental disability into swallowing cinnamon until he became sick. Officers posted a video of the episode on YouTube. The city settled a lawsuit for $8,000 and temporarily suspended the officers.
In response to these and other complaints of excessive force, the mayor and police chief introduced bias training for officers.
But for some minority activists and members of the City Council, the measures were insufficient; they called for a more aggressive civilian watchdog to receive and investigate complaints of police misconduct.
Buttigieg resisted. He argued that the existing Board of Public Safety, whose members the mayor appoints, already served an oversight role. But that board did not conduct its own investigations.
“We pushed and we organized and said this needs to happen,” said Regina Williams-Preston, a member of the City Council who supported a new board. She called Buttigieg’s refusal to endorse the idea “a betrayal of the community.”
Buttigieg said that he embraces civilian review of police and is open to activists’ calls for more robust oversight.
“The bottom line is the concept of civilian review makes sense,” he said. “I think we have it up to a point. I think it’s reasonable to say that we can do more.”
Oliver Davis, a City Council member who is often critical of the mayor, acknowledged the success of many of Buttigieg’s economic initiatives, such as demolishing or repairing 1,000 blighted houses in 1,000 days and rerouting downtown streets to increase pedestrian traffic and lure businesses.
But he said Buttigieg’s inability to solve the challenges of public safety overshadow those achievements.
“If you build up the downtown and fix all the potholes but your police officers are killing people, your people are not around to enjoy it,” he said.
“That is the key issue with Mayor Pete.”
This article originally appeared in
.