South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday addressed new police officers in the city as it grapples with the fallout of an officer-involved shooting over the weekend that prompted Buttigieg to take time off the presidential campaign trail.
Speaking at a swearing-in ceremony for six new South Bend officers, Buttigieg said that the weekend’s events were a “reminder of how much work we have yet to be done” and of “how much work it will take all of us to reinforce trust.
”Early Sunday morning, South Bend Sgt. Ryan O’Neill fatally shot 54-year-old Eric Logan in the parking lot of an apartment complex while responding to a call of a suspicious person possibly breaking into cars. According to O’Neill’s account, Logan was carrying a knife, but the officer’s body camera was not recording during the incident.
Buttigieg has put his rising presidential campaign on pause, including canceling several fundraisers and events, while he deals with the fallout from the shooting. He returned to South Bend to hold an emergency press conference and to meet with community leaders. Earlier this week, he ordered that all body-worn cameras be recording during any work-related interactions between officers and civilians.
At Wednesday’s ceremony, Buttigieg acknowledged the “understandable anger over why our system of body-worn cameras did not lead to a clearer picture of what happened Sunday” and adding that there was a long way to go to reach the day “when no community member or officer would hesitate to trust one another's word.”
In a speech that extolled the value of transparency and of prioritizing mental well-being, he lamented the “sobering” context of the ceremony and spoke of the “instrumental” role the new officers would need to play in repairing a “a crisis in the relationship of officers and those they protect.
”“You are choosing this line of work at a moment when our nation is facing the long shadow of a complex history around policing,” Buttigieg told the group, pointing to racist policing in the distant past but also more recent incidents depicted in viral cell phone videos of events that he said “tarnish the badge and fuel mistrust.”
“We’re dealing with a culture that still sometimes speaks of officers as if they’re soldiers on a battlefield rather than members of the community that they patrol,” he continued. “And we cannot pretend this is not related to race.”
Buttigieg told the group that “it may seem unfair” for officers who may not have spent a single day on the job to “be expected to account in some way for a country's worth of harms and wrongs, sensitivities and concerns past and present.”
But he argued the current climate presented an “enormous opportunity” to right those wrongs, noting that he city's faith in their ability to do so was in part why they were chosen by the department.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine