Mayor Buttigieg and South Bend’s Mysterious Crime

Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks often of “data-driven management”. In his 2019 State of the City address to the citizens of South Bend, Indiana, he described it this way:

“you hear a lot of numbers from me — in this speech and in general — because I believe in carefully measuring our outcomes, watching what works and what doesn’t based on hard data”.

In recent years, when the hard data on violent crime nearly doubled, what did his city hear?

In his 2017 State of the City speech, reflecting on the year 2016, Mayor Buttigieg reported on public safety. Regarding violent crime, he stated that South Bend did not see a “sharp increase in gun-related violence”. He described statistical reductions in specific categories, such as victims of criminally-assaulted shootings and fatal shootings. He noted, for example, that “victims of criminally-assaulted shootings fell from 85 to 81”.

What went unspoken? The FBI categorizes Rapes, Murders, Aggravated Assaults and Robberies as violent crime. In 2016, South Bend’s violent crime data increased dramatically. It registered a 44% change over 2015. Aggravated Assaults, which the FBI defines as “unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury”, more than doubled. Robberies increased 10%. Calls to police surged. About this, Mayor Buttigieg did not speak.

Such a jump in crime data comes with a warning sign. The FBI cautions regarding large shifts in data trends, “large variations in crime levels may indicate modified records procedures, incomplete reporting, or changes in a jurisdiction’s boundaries.” South Bend’s statistical leap could be due to a particular change in local data collection regarding violent crime.

Indeed, in the January 2017 Board of Public Safety meeting, South Bend’s Police Chief, Scott Ruszkowski, attributed the jump in Aggravated Assaults to a reporting change for the category in the middle of 2016. The FBI also noted that South Bend changed its reporting practices. Chief Ruszkowski projected that by the middle of the year the Aggravated Assault numbers “should be more comparable.”

The following year, describing 2017 in his 2018 State of the City address, Mayor Buttigieg offered this data-rich description:

“Overall major crime fell by about 1% compared to the prior year. But at the same time, we have seen an unacceptable number of violent crimes in our city, including three heartbreaking deaths of teenagers this year, a rise consistent with recent national trends. While crime rates in our City remain much lower than when I was a child here, this is cause for concern — and we must work hard to reverse the recent uptick and make sure South Bend is an exception to the national pattern.”

However, the FBI did not record a national rise in violent crime between 2016 and 2017. In its preliminary and final reports for that year, the FBI registered a slight decline. A 9% increase in violent crime did occur years earlier, during 2014–2016, yet came within an overall 16% drop between 2007 and 2017.

In South Bend, by contrast, violent crime was recorded 32% higher in 2017 than in 2007.

Substantially, this could be due to the 2016 Aggravated Assault data reporting change. On the other hand, from 2016 to 2017, Aggravated Assaults continued to grow. The number of Rapes increased 32%. And in the specific categories Buttigieg reported the year prior: victims of criminally-assaulted shootings rose 25%, and fatal shootings climbed 45%. But these statistics were not shared in the speech.

Throughout 2018, the Mayor maintained consistency in his public speaking and writing about violent crime. The word “uptick” was repeated in a written statement, a televised interview and at the city council. This word was also used in a media interview by Chief Ruszkowski.

Mayor Buttigieg published an op-ed in the South Bend Tribune on May 6th, 2018, entitled, “What is Happening With Crime in South Bend?” In it, he reiterated much of his earlier State of the City speech. Using violent crime data from 2016, he compared South Bend to specific and far larger cities, a type of crime data analysis that the FBI warns against. He also wrote:

“Overall violent and property crime rates are down considerably over the last two decades.”

Regarding the violent crime rate, FBI data records that 2016 and 2017 each sustained the highest level of violent crime in South Bend in twenty years. Yet the Mayor claimed that two crime rates, property and violent, had declined significantly in this time. Again, no explanation was provided as to how violent crime’s rise in this period might be understood.

The following year, in his 2019 State of the City address, commenting on 2018, Mayor Buttigieg affirmed South Bend’s “strong foundation of good infrastructure and public safety.” He noted a decline registered in “group- and gang- involved shootings”. He was silent about any specific rise in violent crime.

By the data, 2018 was the most violent year in decades in South Bend. While the city reported substantial reductions in Homicide and Rape from 2017, Aggravated Assault and Robbery grew. South Bend totaled 1222 violent crimes in 2018, and this tally nearly doubled the violent crime sum of 2012. As Police Chief Ruszkowski noted in the first Board of Public Safety meeting of 2019, “unfortunately Aggravated Assault never went down.”

South Bend’s 2018 violent crime rate tripled the 2017 national rate. The increase was dramatic in local terms too. During 2012–2015, South Bend reported an average of 674 violent crimes annually. During 2016–2018, that average leapt to 1108 violent crimes per year — a 64% increase.

What happens to Mayor Buttigieg’s “data-driven management” when hard crime data veers violently? In these mayoral speeches and writings, the public has been steered to positive narratives around decreases in crime. Credit has been given to his administration’s initiatives. At times he has lamented violence as unacceptable.

These official mayoral communications have kept South Bend’s violent crime data inconsistently reported and unexplained. In 2016, for example, Mayor Buttigieg noted specifically how victims of criminally-assaulted shootings declined from 85 to 81. Yet in 2017, when that same category jumped to 102, it went without note. Utilizing “uptick” through 2018 did not render trends in South Bend’s violent crime and shooting data accurately to the public. Also in 2018, remarking on two decades of data, the Mayor indicated that violent crime was down, without addressing its statistical rise in this period, nor how reporting changes might have conditioned this data. And in periods and categories for which the reporting change is not in play, large growth has been registered. Yet this growth has been unarticulated by the Mayor, as with, for example, Aggravated Assaults, which increased 25% from 2017 to 2018.

Local democracy advocates and the South Bend Tribune have accepted the Mayor’s statements. In a ‘Voter’s Guide’ section with South Bend mayoral candidates on April 21, 2019, the Tribune published the statement made by the League of Women Voters, “The violent crime rate is down citywide.” No candidate contradicted this statement in responding to it.

Mayor Buttigieg’s approach appears to be shared by James Mueller, his endorsee to be the next Mayor of South Bend. As Buttigieg’s chief of staff, Mueller developed Mayor‘s initiative on group violence. Mueller states “violent crime is down” in his online campaign platform. He affirmed this again in a statement published in South Bend Tribune on April 21st.

In his final State of the City address, Mayor Buttigieg closed with words addressed to the next mayor. He declared this person’s task as

“ensuring our level of violent crime does not go back to prior levels, and driving it down even further.”

From 1992 to 2017, most years recorded 8 violent crimes or fewer per 1,000 residents in South Bend. 1994 set the high mark for this metric, at 11.5 violent crimes.

In 2018, assuming an estimated population of 102,000 residents, South Bend set this high mark higher: 11.9 violent crimes per 1,000 residents. Yet many South Bend citizens will head to vote at the polls on May 7th unaware. Narrated by Mayor Buttigieg’s particular data-driven style, South Bend finds itself in the midst of a violent crime mystery.

Postscript Updates:

1. Mayor Buttigieg continues to misstate violent crime trends locally. In this interview on May 15, 2019, with WNDU, he states that shootings have declined the last few years. Yet shootings, as noted above, increased dramatically from 2016 to 2017.

2. This analyst of crime data notes how challenging it has been to get accessible and transparent crime data from South Bend Police.

3. Here’s a local television journalist using the word “uptick” to describe South Bend’s violence after 10 shootings occurred in 11 days in early June.