Mayor Pete may find himself with an emptied-out South Bend police department

He doesn't exactly come off looking like a paragon of competence:

As South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg commands national attention with his media-savvy presidential bid, the firestorm back home over an officer-involved shooting shows no sign of settling soon -- with the mayor facing criticism not only from protesters but police who say his handling has crushed morale and risks a “mass exodus” from the force.

“Morale around here has been terrible. We do nothing,” one police officer, 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.”

“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. 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.

“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 officer said.

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.

The latest spike of tension in the long-strained relationship between the mayor and the police department stems from the shooting death of a young black man, Eric Logan, by a white sergeant, Ryan O'Neill.

According to investigators, O’Neill was called to a report of someone breaking into cars and encountered Logan, 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.

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.” 

There seems to be a reasonable explanation why O'Neill's body cam was not turned on (it didn't turn on automatically because his patrol car lights weren't on, and, with an armed car burglar coming at him with a knife, there wasn't a lot of time to turn it on manually. (Okay, Logan was allegedly carrying a knife, but O'Neill and the incident investigators understand how quickly a complete fabrication about such a significant detail would get them into trouble. Is there serious disputation about the knife?)

But Pete has to cast his lot with the narrative of some kind of general "systemic racism."

Buttigieg has claimed he has not taken sides, but amid angry protests back home, he has not challenged the narrative that the shooting is connected to police racism. At an NBC News-hosted presidential primary debate last 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.

It's that kind of stuff that is gong to leave Mayor Pete with a hollowed-out law enforcement agency:

. . . the repeated references to the "shadow" of racism in law enforcement (he said in June that "all police work and all of American life takes place in the shadow of racism") . . . particularly upset officers.

“To me, it’s like he kind of convicted Sgt. O’Neill before anything was even out, making comments like that,” one officer said. “It wasn’t based on the facts of what happened, because we don’t even have all the facts of what happened.”
“It’s like pouring gas on the fire,” the officer said.

"I feel like we're guilty until proven innocent," said another. 

One officer warned that it will significantly affect the hiring of good, new officers to replace them: “When you see the politics and the way police officers are treated by the media and by politicians, it’s like, why would anyone want to sign up to do this job right now?”

So he's going to make his city less safe, just to put himself on the side of one of the most egregious lies in the entire identity-politics hustle. 

Do we really want to find out how he'd manage this kind of thing on a national scale?