The Fall of Police Diversity and the Rise of Violent Crime in South Bend
Gun homicides, non-fatal shootings, and exposure to gun violence stunt lives and, because of their disproportionate impact, reflect and intensify this country’s long-standing racial inequities.
Black and Hispanic children and teens are impacted by gun violence at higher rates than their white peers, in part because of deliberate policy decisions that created segregated neighborhoods and underinvestments in their communities. — Everytown for Gun Safety
In Mayor Buttigieg’s second term, representation of African-Americans in the South Bend Police Department plummeted, while violent crime rocketed. Neither was reported by the Buttigieg administration in a timely and transparent way. These conditions have disproportionately affected South Bend’s African-American community, and are still largely unknown.
I. A Report That Does Not Report
The City of South Bend “Diversity and Inclusion Report”, co-authored by current South Bend Mayor, and former Buttigieg chief of staff James Mueller, was published in 2016. Despite its nearly 60 pages, it did not report about any reductions in the representation of African-Americans among city personnel. In particular, it omitted entirely the significant declines of African-Americans in South Bend Police Department employment from 2013–2015, the period immediately following Mayor Buttigieg’s demotion of South Bend’s first African-American Police Chief, Darryl Boykins, and the obscured decision not to re-appoint Howard Buchanon, an African-American man who served as South Bend’s Fire Chief before Buttigieg took office. Each was replaced with a white man.
Among full time SBPD employees, African-Americans numbered 40 in 2013, and were reduced to 26 by 2015. Among all SBPD employees, including part-time staff, African-American representation dropped from 49 in 2013 to 41 in 2015. And among new hires, just a single African-American employee was hired out of seventeen open positions between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2015.
The 2016 Diversity and Inclusion Report was silent as to why such reductions might have been registered, and reported nothing about poor diversity in hiring. The report made no mention about the coalition of ten African-American SBPD officers who, in 2013–14, filed numerous letters and complaints about “discrimination and unfair treatment” by superiors, and, by early 2016, had several members formally in legal action against the city alleging discrimination. None of this was in the report, nor the many Buttigieg administration communications on diversity that year.
What were the citizens and journalists who read this 58 page report told?
Using a diversity metric apparently unique to the City of South Bend, which employed a catch-all term for its single statistic on diversity and city staff, the Buttigieg diversity report found “staff of color utilization” among sworn protective service workers was just barely over the margin of error of 5% for under-utilization. There was no data regarding specific race or ethnicity, individual departments, salary levels, or trends over time. This was despite the fact that all were present and available to the authors of the report in 2011-2015 City of South Bend EEOC documentation.
The Buttigieg administration was also asked specific questions about the diversity of city personnel, owing to concerns about representation in Police and Fire Departments, by a reporter from the South Bend Tribune in July 2016. The Mayor’s Office declined to disclose this data. Similarly, a local television journalist who requested the city’s employment diversity data in January 2016 was given a set of four pie charts with broad subjects such as “Total Employees By Gender” and “Total Employees by Race” instead of South Bend’s detailed and department specific 2015 EEOC documentation.
II. South Bend’s Dramatic Drop in African-American Police Department Employees
Had citizens and local leaders been properly informed, we might have been able to address declining diversity among police department employees before it became worse. Yet South Bend citizens were told of the attrition of African-Americans from the SBPD first by a CNN report in the summer of 2019. And EEOC data released since that CNN report shows that African-American representation in the South Bend Police Department has fallen in more than one reporting category.
By 2019, just 32 African-Americans remained among all 326 SBPD employees; as a percentage, African-Americans fell to 9.8%, a substantial decline from the high of 14.4% in 2013. Among full-time employees, the African-American representation of 12.7% in 2013 nearly halved by 2019, to 6.8%, or 20 full-time staff. And among SBPD protective service workers, African-Americans in 2019 accounted for just 5.5%, or 10 out of 190.
III South Bend’s Rising Violence
While African-American involvement in policing plummeted, violent crime surged across the city, with a disproportionate toll of African-American victims. In a city that is 27% African-American, according to FBI data from 2012–2017, sixty percent of homicide victims in South Bend were identified as African-American.
Yet Mayor Buttigieg, his administration leaders, and media have kept South Bend’s surge in violent crime obscured.
Some reporters and analysts, as well as Mayor Buttigieg himself in a recent interview with the New York Times Editorial Board, have pointed to reporting changes as the substantial reason for the city’s sharp rise in violent crime data, indicating that increases are largely statistical.
One change does significantly affect the data. The city’s broader reporting of Aggravated Assaults was implemented in 2016, with the FBI explicitly noting that South Bend’s 2016 violent crime data is not comparable with prior years. The city registered a large increase in this category between 2015 and 2016.
The FBI also notes a second reporting change affecting the comparability of South Bend’s 2018 data with prior years. Yet this second reporting change, a shift to the NIBRS reporting system, has not been found by the FBI to significantly impact data trends. Specifically, the FBI has found that the switch to NIBRS yielded a 1% change in Aggravated Assault tallies.
Yet South Bend’s Aggravated Assaults grew 27% from 2017 to 2018, and rose a further 32% from 2018 to 2019. The FBI’s initial reporting of the first half of 2019’s violent crime did not indicate any reporting changes in South Bend. With 2019's full year crime data, the trend of the last three years appears as follows:
The New York Times published a column by an independent crime data analyst also pointing to the 2016 Aggravated Assaults change as the primary explanation of the city’s violent crime rise. The author found that, in terms of homicide rate, South Bend’s was “nearly identical” to cities of its size nationally. But the column strangely omits data from 2017–2018 on Aggravated Assaults, a period when these violent crimes rose dramatically. Nor does the piece mention and contextualize the move to NIBRS reporting in 2018.
Yet that column does select 2018's homicide data, the lowest annual total for homicides in Mayor Buttigieg’s tenure, as the basis for the “nearly identical” comparison with other cities. This analysis ignores the fact that 2018’s homicide total of 9 was far below the average homicide rate for South Bend during Mayor Buttigieg’s time in office, which was 14 homicides per year, 2012–18. Within the analyst’s own basis for comparison, this would make South Bend’s homicide over 50% higher than cities of its size nationally.
As The New York Times published in a more thoroughly reported account earlier in the year, homicides rose roughly 30% during the first seven years of the Buttigieg administration, when compared with the seven years prior. With 2019 data, South Bend’s homicide tally in the eight years of the Buttigieg era is well above the last eight years of the preceding Luecke adminstration.
South Bend’s sharp rise in violent crimes, which is comprised of homicides, rapes, aggravated assaults, and robberies, came with surges in related categories: calls to police and criminally assaulted shootings, which also registered sharp spikes, 2017-2019.
Even South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski admitted to me in 2018 that he had received a phone call from FBI crime analysts indicating that South Bend’s crime data appeared similar to Chicago’s; to my knowledge this has not been communicated to the media or to the public.
IV. Mayor Buttigieg’s Statements on Violent Crime
While Mayor Buttigieg repeatedly told the media that our city’s violent crime data is difficult to interpret, he presented violent crime trends to his own community with simple words and phrases that are at odds with the data.
In an early 2018 statements, Mayor Buttigieg repeatedly called South Bend’s rise in shootings an “uptick”. Yet victims of criminally assaulted shootings had risen 25% in 2017 from 2016, and fatal shootings climbed 45%.
In a 2018 South Bend Tribune op-ed, the Mayor wrote that “Overall violent and property crime rates are down considerably over the last two decades.”
Yet 2016 and 2017, according to FBI data records, each sustained the highest tally of violent crime in South Bend in twenty years, not adjusting for 2016’s reporting change. Mayor Buttigieg did not explain how his claim could be supported by crime data, or provide a source for his assertion.
In 2019, Mayor Buttigieg indicated again in his final State of the City address that violent crime was down, declaring that the role of the next mayor was “driving it [violent crime] down even further.” City leaders, including Buttigieg’s head of Community Investment, and former Chief of Staff, James Mueller, also repeatedly stated that “violent crime is down”, including in a Voter’s Guide before citizens went to the polls.
Yet 2018's violent crime total of 1222, as reported to the South Bend Board of Public Safety, exceeded 2017’s tally of 1064 by 15%. Mayor Buttigieg and his associates again offered no support for their public claims.
And throughout 2019, a record-breaking year for violence in South Bend, the City of South Bend and its leadership failed to provide accurate data, descriptions, or appropriate responses to surging violent crime. On July 18 2019 I discovered that South Bend’s violent crime data since February 2019 had been erroneously reported to the public, while 2018 violent crime totals were not added to the city’s open data site by the middle of 2019.
Other crime data advocates were stymied by South Bend’s obscure statistical practices; SpotCrime.com, for example, wrote in a March 2019 column, “More often than not South Bend has made excuses as to why they are unable to share data. All the while South Bend police department has been willingly providing data to a paid third party vendor. Allowing a preferential private company better access to public information is not in the interest of transparency. Doing this locks the data in a siloed and controlled environment that can’t be inspected, therefore, reducing accountability.”
In 2019 South Bend saw its violent crime rate rocket higher; the yearly total of 1467 violent crimes was 20% higher than 2018’s reports, and 35% higher than 2017’s. The year had two months that broke March 2018’s four year record of 14 shootings in a month: June had 26 shootings, and August had 15. The year concluded with a 39% rise in criminally assaulted shooting victims.
Yet many key points of this violent year had no accurate and clear statement by Mayor Buttigieg about violent crime’s sharp rise. And the Mayor did not attend seven of eight community meetings called by his administration about policing. Nor has his endorsed successor, James Mueller, provided detail; Mayor Mueller and mayoral candidate Mueller frequently stated “one shooting is one too many”, or a similar iteration, instead of communicating clearly and with detail about South Bend’s surge in violence as it happened.
Conclusion
Obscured statistics and misleading or vague statements from Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his administration have kept our community from vital and timely information.
South Bend’s rising epidemic of violence, claiming African-American lives in a disproportionate manner, has gone unvoiced by its elected leaders, just as declines in African-American leadership and representation in policing were hidden from public view. Most citizens, in our community and nationally, are still unaware of these unjust and tragic conditions.
