This is going to be a two parter because I have a lot I want to cover. This post will be about his track record in South Bend. Part II will be about just his presidential campaign. I’m not going to get into McKinsey because you can (finally) easily find that information.
I’m going to start with the accomplishments he touts, and I’m going to be as fair to him as I possibly can. This post is going to be laden with links to my sources, so please take a look at what I relied on to make my claims.
He put a lot of money and effort into transforming downtown South Bend. He did stretch the city’s funds and strapped them for years to come, but the result was a 21% increase in property value downtown. This brought in new outside investment so I’m going to go ahead and call this a win for Pete, although the linked article is more nuanced than that.
Now onto Pete’s claims about income and poverty in South Bend. Like nearly all politicians in the world, Pete presents the rosiest picture possible, and gives himself credit for national trends. He was after all, elected in 2012 so the country was still in recession recovery mode. Here’s a good article that takes an objective look at how South Bend fared compared to other similar cities. The short summary is that it’s complicated. His claims include the normal sort of puffery that one would expect from a politician. I’m going to disregard the increase in median income because that increased nationally during that period. One notable thing here is that the poverty rate in South Bend dropped from 32% in 2011 to 20% in 2017. I honestly can’t pinpoint what to attribute that to, but you should know that during that same period, the poverty rate nationally only dropped 2.7%. As of this year, that poverty rate is back up to 25.4%. Maybe Pete gets some credit here. Maybe not. I honestly can’t tell but if he gets credit for the drop, then he also gets credit for the rise.
Here’s one that Pete does get a lot of credit from me for. During his tenure, a lot of investment went into renovating and upgrading a lot of public spaces around South Bend including parks and community centers. I am always a big fan of this type of spending because everyone ultimately wins. It creates jobs, safer spaces, and most importantly; a place where people want to live. More spending on infrastructure and public spaces makes for a more attractive city to live in. I do want to note that this is the only think Pete has done in South Bend that tells me that he may actually be a democrat. Literally everything else he’s done comes from republican ideas of “trickle down” and McKinsey’s approach of “efficiency” (i.e. cut, cut, cut). But this investment is definitely a positive for Pete.
Here’s another thing Pete did that I can’t praise enough. He partnered with a Latino outreach organization (La Casa de Amistad) to create an ID card that undocumented residents of South Bend could use to come out of the shadows. The card itself and all of the administration and costs associated with it is run entirely by La Casa de Amistad so the city has no access to any information regarding the card holders. That was smart. Pete signed an executive order requiring city departments like as police, fire and parks to accept the card as valid ID.
One of the things that Pete liked to brag about was his “1,000 houses in 1,000 days” program. I’m not sure why he’s proud of this, since there was no plan beyond the demolition phase so now there are over 1,000 vacant lots that it appears, will remain vacant indefinitely. Here’s my main issue with what he did here, and it goes back to what I eluded to earlier when I said that it was hard for me to find much evidence that Pete is actually a democrat. This program was 100% republican. The city tore down abandoned homes. So far, so good. For run down homes that were occupied, the city issued fines and deadlines to make repairs. Now, I’m pretty sure that no one lets their biggest investment (and asset) decay because they’re too busy sipping champagne on The Riviera. No, you don’t paint your house because you can’t afford it. There was no investment from the city at all to help with repairs. Maybe they could have done a grant program where the city pays for supplies if the homeowner can find the labor to do the work? With the astronomical poverty levels in South Bend, I’m certain that there is a plethora of skilled labor that could have been tapped. Maybe a very low interest loan program? There are a myriad of things they could have done, rather than to punish poor people for being poor and I’m sure they could have been done for a fraction of what the downtown redevelopment project cost.
Now I’m going to get to the most problematic part of Pete’s record in South Bend. You’ve heard some of this, but I promise that you haven’t heard the details because the main stream media won’t report them to you. At this point, I hope that you noticed that I spend dozens of hours on the South Bend Tribune site to vet Pete. I got about 70% of this story from the South Bend Tribune’s reporting, and the rest from independent investigative journalists who dug up details that the Tribune didn’t have. The Tribune initially derided these reports, but they now cite them so we have a double verification situation here. I first became aware of this situation about 9 months ago via an independent investigative report. I spend literally months cross referencing information that I could verify in the Tribune so this was a long process of vetting for me. I bookmarked some of what I found, and unfortunately failed to bookmark some of it. In the interest of making this post less dense, here’s a link that will get you to all of the articles I read in the Tribune so that you can do your own poking around. Trust me when I tell you that I read every article in that search result. The rest of this post will include links as well.
This is about the firing of Darryl Boykins, which Pete has repeatedly lied about when asked for details. So let me start with Pete’s version: 13 weeks into his tenure as mayor of South Bend, Pete felt that he had no choice but to fire Darryl Boykins (who was the first black police chief in South Bend) because he discovered that Boykins was being investigated by the FBI for secretly taping police officers’ phone calls.
Right off the bat, Pete’s story is curious. He fired a police chief because he heard that there’s an investigation into potentially illegal wiretapping? An investigation. Not an indictment. So I guess there’s no presumption of innocence and no need to wait for the results of an investigation? And on the basis of an investigation, this (then) 30 year old Mayor, in his 13th week in office decides that it’s a good idea to fire (it ended up being a demotion) the first black Police Chief in a town whose black residents make up 1/4 of the population? This already smells funny. He had to know that firing (or trying) the first black police chief was going to set off a powder keg so the risk/reward ratio on waiting for the results of the investigation don’t make sense here.
I couldn’t find any information to indicate that Boykins was ever the target of any investigation, and his attorney claims that the FBI never informed him that he was the target of an investigation. 5 or 6 weeks after Pete tried to fire Boykins, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana announced that their investigation into the wiretap was closed, and that they weren’t going to proceed with any charges against anyone. Let me repeat, this happened weeks after the attempted firing. Weeks earlier, Pete claimed that the US Attorney told him that Boykins and DePaepe would face felony charges if the mayor didn’t make personnel changes in the police department. What the actual fuck? Someone is lying here, and his name rhymes with seat. But it gets worse.
In addition to firing Boykins, Pete fired Karen DePaepe. She was the only other person to hear what was recorded on those tapes. She subsequently sued the city and received a settlement of $235,000. Here’s what she claims (in court documents) are on the tapes, “The documents say that, in February 2011, two white police officers were heard discussing a campaign to get rid of Boykins, with Buttigieg donors acting as go-betweens. In April, the officers say they believe Buttigieg is unaware of the plan, and that they expect the “little fucking squirt,” as one calls him, to win the mayoral nomination. After he does win, a third officer in June reports hearing directly from Buttigieg that “Boykins is done.”
We don’t actually know what’s on the tapes because a lot of effort has been made to keep them from the public. These efforts have come from Pete and the police officers (who are presumably on the tapes). The law suits over the tapes have been going on since 2012. The City Council is adamant that they want the tapes released. The parties blocking the release keep changing slightly but until recently, it was Pete and some of his donors.
Pete has repeatedly said that he doesn’t know what’s on the tapes. Really? No curiosity at all, huh? Once again, this smells funny on its face. As you can see from this reporting, it’s inconceivable that he hasn’t at the very least read transcripts of the tapes. His lawyer definitely has. Maybe someone could translate them into Norwegian to help stimulate his intellectual curiosity?
Let me get back to Boykins for a second. In June, a couple of weeks after the investigation into the wiretap was complete, Pete was asked if he would reinstate Boykin. He replied, “If somebody makes such a serious mistake, that they bring down a major investigation on their department, they’re not going to be able to keep a leadership position in this administration and they’re probably going to lose my confidence fast”. What? Boykins didn’t make a serious mistake. The wiretap was clearly a mistake and clearly not illegal and may well have preceded Boykins. This guy can’t stop lying.
There’s a lot more to this story that I won’t get into, but if you’re interested you can read this, this, this, and this. And when you’re done with that, you can use the link above to cross reference those articles with the Tribune. Just know that Pete and his campaign have never denied any of this reporting. When asked to comment, they’ve pulled things like, “we won’t dignify these allegations….” That’s a common tool used to avoid making an actual denial, which could become a legal liability later. The dumb ones like Trump deny with abandon, even when there’s video evidence contradicting the denials. The smart ones like Petey “won’t dignify….” so that they can avoid any legal liability if it comes out that they lied.
There’s another incident that helps to establish a pattern of behavior on Pete’s part. This one involves the police chief (Ron Teachman) that Pete appointed after he demoted Boykins. In this incident, there was a brawl at a rec center. A black police officer, Dave Newton went to break up the fight. The allegation is that Teachman watched this happen and didn’t bother to go out and back up Newton. There was an investigation into the incident which produced a report. Based on that report, Pete decided that Teachman did nothing wrong and no disciplinary action was warranted. The majority (we don’t have exact numbers) of the Board of Public Safety agreed that no disciplinary action was warranted. The board President, Pat Cottrell (he’s a retired cop) did not agree. In fact, he so vehemently disagreed that he resigned his position. Huh. As with the tapes, Pete refused to release the report. He said that it was “personnel matter… We don’t disclose personnel records as required by (state) law.”
Pete always chooses opacity over transparency. This has been true of his record in South Bend and of his campaign. It is oily, and really speaks to his character. As it happens, a transcript of the report was leaked and it says the opposite of what Pete says it said. In fact, all of the witnesses who were interviewed during the course of the investigation observed Teachman standing back and failing to back up his fellow officer. All of them. What happened, Pete? I thought that when someone made a serious mistake that creates the need for an investigation, they’ve lost your trust? I don’t know if Teachman is among the racists on the South Bend police force. I don’t know if racism is why he did what he did, but I do know that some form of disciplinary action was warranted here.
The tapes are going to come out. I don’t know if it’s going to be this year or 5 years from now, but they’re going to come out. Until they do, we have to wonder why the cops (who allegedly made a slew of racist remarks on those tapes) and Pete don’t want them made public.
There is clearly a pattern of racism on that police force, and no one including the mayor wants to do anything about it. So when Eric Logan was shot by a cop with a history racism, and Pete’s mea culpa is limited to “I didn’t get it done”, that’s not even in the ballpark of accurate. The murderous cop, like Dan Pantaleo (who murdered Eric Garner) had a history of charges of racism against him. In fact, these killer cops almost always have prior incidents that should raise red flags. In this instance, the cop was promoted by another Pete appointee.
No Pete, you didn’t fail to “get it done”, you perpetuated the problem.
So now you’re starting to see why Pete is polling at zero percent with the black vote.
Stay tuned for part II, which will focus on the fuckery during his campaign.
