(Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Activists and former city officials in the city of South Bend have called on Mayor Pete Buttigieg to resign his position as Mayor, following outrage in response to the shooting of a black man by a white police officer.
“Pete is a fraud,” former president of South Bend’s Board of Public Safety Pat Cottrell told the Washington Free Beacon in an exclusive interview Monday.
Cottrell claims Mayor Buttigieg has a poor record on racial issues and administrative control.
“To start with trying to heal, the mayor just needs to resign,” Mario Sims, a pastor and activist, said. Sims called Buttigieg “tone-deaf” on racial issues.
“I understand political ambition, I understand that,” Sims said. “But you’re playing games with the lives of the people here, and innocent police officers.”
The Washington Examiner reported that Sims wants Mayor Buttigieg withdraw from politics entirely until he has spent “some time evaluating this.”
“Right now there’s no way he can stand on the stage and honestly talk about the issues pressing this country when he can’t even successfully address the dire issues of race, lack of diversity, and poverty, not to mention the homeless issue in this city,” Sims said.
“If you can’t even address those issues in a city of 100,000, my God, how can you address those issues in 50 states?” he added.
Buttigieg’s administration came under criticism after Sgt. Ryan O’Neill of the South Bend Police Department shot Eric Logan, who reportedly charged the officer with a knife. O’Neill did not have his body camera on when the incident occured June 16, and Logan died shortly afterward in the hospital.
Since the shooting, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has faced questions surrounding the incident including at Thursday’s Democratic Debate.
“It’s a mess,” Buttigieg said. “We’re hurting. I could walk you through all of the things we have done, as a community, all of the steps we’ve took from bias training to de-escalation, but it didn’t save the life of Eric Logan.”
WIBC host Tony Katz told listeners that residents of South Bend have every right to be enraged by the circumstances of the Logan shooting and criticized Mayor Buttigieg’s response to the incident.
“Isn’t it possible that the officer in question didn’t turn on his body camera – and for that alone, I would throw him off the force – and he was attacked by Eric Logan? Aren’t both things possible? Not to Pete Buttigieg because that part doesn’t matter. We still have to, it’s all about the systemic racism.
He threw the police under the bus. This is a massive story.
The people of South Bend are going to get left behind. Why? Because in the era of identity politics, they don’t matter.”
Click the link below to hear Tony’s full commentary.
