Buttigieg's police may quit the South Bend force

"What, me worry?"

Indiana -- South Bend Mayor and 2020 Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, who frequently uses the Lord's name in vain and is married to a dude, may have raised a lot of money for his campaign, but all that's being raised in his hometown is hell, and not in a fun way.

It's over an officer-involved shooting by a white cop, Ryan O'Neill, and a black victim, Eric Logan, and it doesn't look like it's going to soon be assuaged.

Buttigieg is being loudly criticized from both protestors and his police department. The police say his handling has crushed morale and risks a “mass exodus” from the force.

“Morale around here has been terrible. We do nothing,”  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.” Of course, they are police officers, not firemen.

“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 and possibly MSNBC. 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.

They say that, but will they really do it?

“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 cop said, referring especially to Buttigieg, who looks remarkably like famed cartoon figure for Mad Magazine, Alfred E. Neuman [see photo above].

South Bend Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) President Harvey Mills told Fox News that he has spoken to five or six officers who are “seriously” considering retiring or resigning because of the administration’s handling of the shooting. One officer told Fox News that he believes as many as 10 people will quit in the next year, and said he has also considered stepping away.

“It’s very discouraging that something I’ve always wanted to do, that God called me to do, that I’m questioning that and wondering, thinking about not being a police officer strictly because of politics and things that are going on that are completely out of my control,” he said.

Buttigieg has long had a strained relationship with the officers in South Bend, but that relationship has deteriorated considerably since the shooting of Logan.

According to investigators, O’Neill was called to a report of someone breaking into cars and encountered Logan O’Neill, who was allegedly carrying a knife. According to authorities, O'Neill shot Logan after he approached him with the knife and ignored repeated demands to drop it, the South Bend Tribune reported.

But O’Neill’s body camera was not on to confirm his account, and skeptics of the department's account have blasted city officials, fueling a firestorm that repeatedly has pulled Buttigieg off the trail to deal with the crisis back home. The reason his body cam was off may have been due to the swiftness O'Neill had to use in thwarting a knife attack, but that has not been determined as yet.

O’Neill resigned last week, with the FOP saying in a statement that “job related stress, the lawsuit, national media attention, and hateful things said on social media have been difficult for O’Neill and his young family.”

Buttigieg has falsely claimed that he hasn't taken sides, but amid angry protests back home, he has not challenged the narrative that the shooting is connected to police racism because votes are more important to him than integrity.

At an NBC News presidential primary debate this 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, [my italics].

Buttigieg has also come under fire with naughty words and anger from black residents who think he has not done enough to reform the police department and was pelted with criticism from angry South Bend residents last month.

But it was the repeated inappropriate references to the "shadow" of racism in law enforcement (saying in June that "all police work and all of American life takes place in the shadow of racism") that particularly pissed off the cops.

To progressives, white bread or owning a dog is racist if you're white.



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