How is he supposed to be able to run a country if he can’t manage a small city?
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has been embroiled in controversy for several weeks after a white policeman shot a black man to death. The officer, Sgt. Ryan O’Neill, shot and killed Eric Logan after he responded to a call of someone breaking into cars. O’Neill claims that Logan, armed with a knife, advanced on him after repeated orders to stop and was fatally shot.
But O’Neill did not turn on his body cam, so, of course, the officer’s account of what happened became not only immediately suspect, but O’Neill was tried, convicted, and hung by the South Bend media and black activists.
So how did our new liberal hero — the man who would be president — handle this crisis?
He all but called the police department racists.
Buttigieg has claimed he has not taken sides, but amid angry protests back home, he has not challenged the narrative that the shooting is connected to police racism. At an NBC News-hosted presidential primary debate last month, Buttigieg described the shooting as “a black man …killed by a white officer” and said he “could walk through all of the steps we took, from bias training to de-escalation, but it didn’t save the life of Eric Logan. And when I look into his mother’s eyes, I have to face that fact and nothing that I say will bring him back.”
“Until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism, whatever this particular incident teaches us, we will be left with the bigger problem of the fact that there is a wall of mistrust, put up one racist act at a time, not just what’s happened in the past, but from what’s happening around the country in the present,” he said.
The cops didn’t appreciate hizzoner’s vacillating comments — not when they expected their mayor to voice his support in the face of wildly unfair and untrue criticism of the police.
“Morale around here has been terrible. We do nothing,” one police officer, a 20-year veteran of the force, told Fox News. “We call ourselves firemen, we sit around in parking lots until we’re called and then we go to the call, because if you say or do something wrong, then you get hung.”
“At an all-time low,” another officer said of morale. “It’s been really demoralizing and hard to come to work lately.”
Officers requested not to be identified for this story in fear of retaliation by the mayor’s administration. But they told Fox News that they know of multiple officers who are considering handing in their badges or taking retirement if eligible, in response to the mayor’s handling of the shooting.
“That’s the big discussion … is who’s staying and who’s going. I think you’re going to see a mass exodus, our administration is a joke,” one officer said.
This is exactly what “reform activists” want. Perhaps they’re not looking to promote a crime wave, but for them, the goal of fewer people incarcerated is more important than keeping people safe.
Then there’s the usual blather used by Black Lives Matter and others simply to stir the racial pot. “Hands up. Don’t shoot” is still part of the narrative in the shooting death of Michael Brown by a white officer in Ferguson, Mo. even though 3 separate autopsies — one conducted by Brown’s family and another by President Obama’s Department of Justice — show that mantra to be a vicious lie.
Instead of standing up for his police department and the officers who put their hides on the line every day, Buttigieg enabled further protests with his mealy-mouthed condemnation of both racism and false narratives about the shooting.
It didn’t help his standing with the black community either.
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