Legal documents related to Pete Buttigieg’s ousting of South Bend’s first black police chief describe a plan by white police officers in 2011 to use Buttigieg’s campaign donors to get him to remove the chief, Darryl Boykins, once Buttigieg became mayor.
“It is going to be a fun time when all white people are in charge,” one officer is quoted as saying in the documents, which describe secret police recordings. The previously undisclosed documents shed new light on the most controversial chapter of Buttigieg’s South Bend political career.
The documents describe a plan to use two Buttigieg donors — including his campaign chairman — to lobby Buttigieg on personnel changes at the South Bend Police Department (SBPD). Both donors deny having such discussions with Buttigieg.
As he runs for president, Pete Buttigieg has tried to contain the public fallout from the fatal police shooting this summer of a 54-year-old black father in South Bend, Indiana. Instead his closed-door efforts have only exacerbated his problems with black activists.
Members of Black Lives Matter, who met privately with Buttigieg in the weeks after the shooting, say the 37-year-old Democratic mayor brushed off their concerns about police violence in the city he has led since 2012.
“He seemed to have already taken a side. It did seem that he was prioritizing who he thought was important, and it didn’t seem to be black people,” said Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter who participated in a July call between the mayor and activists.
“I remember he felt very rushed, as if he wanted to check it off a box as something that he did,” said Abdullah, who is a professor at California State University in Los Angeles.
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