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SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Pete Buttigieg was Mayor of the City just 13 weeks old when he faced a leadership crisis.
It was March 2012, and 300 residents of South Bend, Indiana, marched solemnly at the Martin Luther King Center to protest the Florida murder of a black teen, Trayvon Martin.
Darryl Boykins, South Bend's first black police chief, played a leading role at the protest. Admired for teaching tennis and boxing to young people, he had been promoted to chief five years earlier after gaining the respect of black and white officers in a department sometimes divided along racial lines.
Mr. Buttigieg spoke to the protesters, but apparently did not interact with Mr. Boykins. No one in the crowd knew that senior police officers were in turmoil – shaken by allegations that Mr. Boykins had recorded phone calls improperly recorded on white senior officers who allegedly used racist language, including about her.
While federal prosecutors were probing Mr. Boykins, the 29-year-old mayor fired the veteran police chief just before Trayvon Martin's protest. No action was taken against the officers. The public is unaware precisely what they said on cassettes of their ministry's phone calls: Buttigieg refused to release them, saying the case was still being resolved in court.
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In the weeks, months and years that followed, the dismissal of Mr. Boykins sparked a storm of complaints, counterclaims and lawsuits, as well as anxiety among residents of the South minority. Bend to find out if an ambitious white mayor was lined up alongside white policemen against a black policeman. chief. The day after Mr. Boykins' dismissal, he was applauded at a rally of 100 officers, council members and clergy. The events took place in a climate of frustration among some African-Americans, who did not benefit in the same way from the economic recovery in South Bend, which Mr. Buttigieg advocates in his candidacy for the presidency.
While Buttigieg is looking for the Democratic nomination in a party whose base is anchored in minority voters, his handling of Mr. Boykins' dismissal and its untidy consequences raises questions as to whether the mayor had misunderstood or mismanaged racial and police sensibilities in the place that he knew. better, a city that is 37% black and latino.
"It made my heart ache," said Buttigieg on the night of the 2012 protest, during an interview. "To know that the same day we were at what I understood then that would be the beginning of an incredibly painful and divisive moment in interracial relations in my city."
At that time, Mr. Buttigieg stated that he had dismissed his police chief because he had lost confidence in him after discovering the F.B.I. was investigating him for secretly recording the officers' phone calls. The leader sued the city for racial discrimination for his dismissal and earned $ 50,000 in 2013. Four white officers sued the city for invasion of privacy and defamation and earned $ 500,000 the same year.
In a political brief published this year, Buttigieg wrote that the case of police recordings "has affected my relationship with the African-American community especially for years to come."
Some minority leaders in South Bend said the case was an example of deafness from a rising star in the Democratic area of 2020.
Mr. Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate and the first millennium to become president, received a wave of attention and support – $ 7 million in donations, an unexpected strength in polls and coverage Positive of the news.
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On Sunday, he began his campaign with a rally in a formerly abandoned Studebaker car factory, now covered with high-tech glass and conducive to the creation of new businesses. This was proof of South Bend's "turnaround story," which the mayor says to refute skeptics who claim that America has never raised a mayor at the White House – let alone whoever governs fewer citizens than to return to some Big Ten football stadiums.
His accomplishments include the commercial revival of the downtown core, the creation of 12,000 jobs during his two terms as well as the demolition or repair of more than 1,000 dilapidated houses to fight the urban plague.
But there were few people of color at his rally. Former Democratic consultant David Axelrod, a friend of the mayor, said in a Tweet: "The crowd looks very big, very impressive but also very white – an obstacle that it will have to overcome."
Regina Williams-Preston, who represents a black majority district on South Bend's city council, described Buttigieg as "a smart, kind guy," but added, "We need to look beyond the Polish and really look at the policy. "
She said minority activists had lobbied for years for the creation of a Citizens' Review Committee that would play a role in the discipline and promotions of the police. At Mr. Buttigieg's Speaking on the state of the city in 2017, she is surprised to hear that she has named a long-standing group, the Mayor's appointed Public Safety Council, which prides itself on having a review committee now in place. citizens.
"The citizens had asked for the creation of a citizens' review committee, and for him to say that we had one, it's actually the same thing we've always had, it was really misleading," he said. said Mrs. Williams-Preston. "It's not because you say it does not do it. For me, it was a betrayal. "
Police registration involves some of the most serious issues in municipal and national politics, including surveillance and privacy, government transparency, and allegations of racism and unlawful behavior on the part of the police. police.
Kareemah Fowler, South Bend's city secretary and Buttigieg's political ally, said the mayor had worked hard to "try to bridge the gap" between African-Americans and whites in the city.
But Ms. Fowler, whose 2015 campaign championed by Buttigieg has made her the first African-American to hold a full-time executive position in the county, acknowledged that Buttigieg's record is not that much. Was not translated by enthusiastic support of black voters to his presidency. campaign.
She said police controversy was a painful episode for the city – and for a young mayor, she said, who "learned a lot from this experience."
"Think about where he came from – a Harvard graduate, his parents are two teachers," Fowler said. "Before that, he'd probably never been in an environment where he would have had to deal with racial tensions."
Mr. Buttigieg has appointed two White Chiefs since the end of Mr. Boykins' term. The city has put in place strategies to increase the confidence of officers among minorities – setting up body cameras and targeted training for officers, as well as posting incident reports on the use of force. Nevertheless, the representation of minorities within the department remains weak. Only 5% of officers were African American and 5% Hispanic in 2018, a slight decrease from the previous year.
"Over the years, probably 20 minority officers have left their jobs," said Derek Dieter, a retired police officer from South Bend and a former white city council president.
Critics of the mayor said he was too willing to settle several lawsuits on police records to remove the problem, which ultimately cost a lot city close to $ 2 million. The council itself sued the mayor, trying to get access to the cassettes, a case still being pending, arguing that there was no reason for that. He holds them back.
Mr Buttigieg disputes this. Federal and state laws on wiretapping, he told him, forbid him from broadcasting tapes.
But he also acknowledged that he did not understand very early the wider racial dimensions of the case cassettes, considering it only "in a very legalistic way."
"The longer it lasted," he said, "the longer the issue became long and costly in divisions and costly, the more it was clear to me that there were many other issues involved that – not only the head of politics, but symbolic leader of the community – I had a lot of responsibility in healing racial divisions, of which this incident was only the tip of the iceberg. "
Today, none of the four officers heard on the bands, who have held positions of responsibility in the department, still work there. Mr. Buttigieg, who said he had never listened to the tapes because of legal restrictions, does not know whether the police officers made racist remarks or talked about illegal activities, as the documents before the court claim. The mayor referred to the agreements signed by the city with Mr. Boykins and the agents, in which all parties acknowledged the absence of evidence of "illegal acts committed by the plaintiffs" and denied the agents "for n & rsquo; Using any racist word against former police chief, Darryl Boykins ".
So why did Mr. Buttigieg fired Mr. Boykins in the first place? He claims to have been pressured by federal prosecutors. In "Shortest Way Home", his memoir published in February, he writes that prosecutors "conveyed a message" that he was to expel Mr. Boykins or they would sue him for violating federal law on him. wiretap.
Department officials complained to the US Attorney's Office in northern Indiana that the chief had illegally recorded their phone calls and threatened to use the cassettes against them.
The mayor speculates in his book that prosecutors were trying to evade responsibility for "tearing down a beloved Afro-American police chief" by asking Mr. Buttigieg to fire him instead.
He repeated the explanation this week. "It was very clear to me from the F.B.I. and the American lawyer who said that we would take measures to promote employment or that there would be indictments, "he said.
Boykins' lawyer, Tom Dixon, said that when he heard that explanation, invoked by Mr. Buttigieg in 2012, a red flag had been raised. He interviewed a deputy prosecutor of the US Attorney's Office, a lawyer he knew from the church, about the mayor's assertion.
"He said," Tom, this explanation is so contrary to the protocols of US prosecutors' offices, "said Dixon." "We would never condition a decision on prosecutions or proceed on the basis of a decision. This would never happen.
Mr. Boykins emphasized that the recordings were made inadvertently, as part of a long-standing police practice of registering certain telephone lines.
After Mr. Buttigieg dismissed Mr. Boykins in March 2012 by asking for his resignation, Mr. Boykins made his decision and then quashed it; Mr. Buttigieg then demoted the leader to the rank of captain. He has since retired. Mr. Boykins did not respond to messages requesting comments.
Police communications director Karen DePaepe heard the tapes. In the documents before the court, she described them as "discriminatory racist comments from senior officers" in the department and said she had spoken to Mr. Boykins. She also heard "something that I think may be illegal."
Eleven days after Boykins' dismissal as chief, Ms. DePaepe, who had taken eight cassettes of phone calls and gave them to the chief, was fired.
In an interview that night, she told the South Bend Tribune that Buttigieg's chief of staff, Mike Schmuhl – who is currently his presidential campaign director – threatened to be arrested if she spoke in public.
"He said," Now you understand that … you and no one else is allowed to discuss the federal investigation or anything that has been registered "" said Ms. DePaepe to Mr. Schmuhl, according to the newspaper. "And if you or someone else does it, you will be arrested."
The city paid Ms. DePaepe $ 235,000 in 2014 to settle a lawsuit she filed for defamation and other claims. As part of its settlement, she agreed not to discuss what was on the tapes.
A spokesman for the Buttigieg campaign said Schmuhl recalled his conversation with Ms. DePaepe differently from the one reported by the newspaper.
Since Mr. Buttigieg was first elected in 2011, many in South Bend have taken it for granted that he aspired to hold positions of responsibility, with the support of the local democratic machine, and was carefully recording a balance sheet. of his achievements.
One of those goals was to bring businesses and people back to downtown. After the city spent tens of millions of dollars on pedestrian streets and encouraged developers, new hotels, restaurants and apartments were created.
Decades of deindustrialization since Studebaker closed its car plant in the 1960s – and the city lost a quarter of its inhabitants – were clogged. The population has risen by a modest 1 percent, to 102,000 people, under the mayor.
But the benefits did not also benefit the large minority communities of South Bend.
Some data are dismal. Although the overall poverty rate has declined since Mr. Buttigieg took office, the poverty of African Americans remains stubbornly almost twice as high as that of African Americans in the country.
The city has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, which doubled under the mayor, according to the expulsion laboratory at Princeton University.
In households with working adults, 54% do not earn enough to have a "survival budget," according to United Way.
The city center can again attract many people, but not everyone can participate.
"You have blacks, we are looking out the window of people who are eating a steak," said Mario Sims, a pastor and community activist.
Mr. Sims has been running protests against police records for years, most recently last summer when a federal court of appeal ruled in the case brought by the city council , known as the Common Council, which sought to make the recordings public.
The case arose when counsel assigned Mr. Buttigieg in 2012 to hand over the recordings. The city attorney asked a federal court to determine whether the mayor could comply or not.
A federal district judge initially ruled that some recordings could be made public, but an appellate court dismissed the case entirely, saying the case was not under federal jurisdiction. The matter was referred to the state judicial system, to the courts of St. Joseph County, where he stays. The city pulled out of the fight, leaving it between the council and the police, who do not want the tapes to be broadcast.
While Buttigieg is campaigning for the post of president far beyond the borders of Indiana, the cassettes affair and his relations with minorities dominate him. He points out that during his re-election to the presidential election in 2015, he defeated a leading African-American opponent, even in the city's very dark, second district.
Some say the tapes will never be made public. Others, including Williams-Preston, a member of the second district's municipal council, expect them to come out and include material that could ignite racial divisions.
"We have to prepare for this as a community," she said.
Whenever that happens, she said, Mr. Buttigieg, whose term ends this year, will probably be a long way from South Bend. Ms. Williams-Preston, a teacher educator specializing in education, runs to take up her position.
"In our culture, we want to find a hero," she said. "But I want people to understand the story of South Bend. Every good story has an imperfect hero, where they struggle with something and they overcome it. I'm not sure Pete is completely out of date. But we gave him the opportunity to fight against some problems. "
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