Pete called me a few months ago and said his police dept had a good policy because it was written by Lexipol - a company founded to help police avoid accountability - and he didn’t think police misconduct was an issue in South Bend because so few complaints were upheld by police.
He just volunteered this information like it was a smart or understandable thing to say. You need at least a basic understanding of issues that are critical to your own constituents’ lives in order to be mayor - let alone president - and he really did not have that understanding.
Media has focused on the firing of the police chief, which itself is bad, but this is much deeper. It’s a pattern of discriminatory policing, as evidenced by their own data, and the policies and ignorance of city leadership that allow police violence to persist in South Bend.
If you think it’s a good thing that a police department almost never holds officers accountable when communities report misconduct, then your vision of accountability is not consistent with what the country needs.
If you’re paying a company to write your city’s use of force standards that was founded by police lawyers who defend officers in court when they shoot people, you shouldn’t be the person leading the effort to change the nation’s use of force standards. This is straightforward.
