The Long Run: Pete Buttigieg Fired South Bend's Black Police Chief. It Still Stings. [View all]

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SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Pete Buttigieg had been mayor just 13 weeks when he faced a leadership crisis.

It was March 2012, and 300 residents of South Bend, Ind., solemnly marched to the Martin Luther King Center to protest the killing in Florida of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin.

A prominent figure at the demonstration was Darryl Boykins, South Bend’s first black police chief. Admired for teaching tennis and boxing to young people, he had been promoted to chief five years earlier after winning the respect of both black and white officers in a department that sometimes divided along racial lines.

Mr. Buttigieg addressed the protesters, but seemed not to interact with Mr. Boykins. What no one in the crowd knew was that the police top brass were in turmoil — shaken by allegations that Mr. Boykins had improperly taped phone calls of senior white officers who were said to have used racist language, including about him.

With federal prosecutors scrutinizing Mr. Boykins, the 29-year-old mayor fired the veteran police chief just before the Trayvon Martin protest. No action was taken against the officers. Precisely what they said on the tapes of their department phone calls is unknown to the public: Mr. Buttigieg has refused to release them, saying the matter is still being resolved in court.

In the weeks, months and years that followed, the removal of Mr. Boykins unleashed a blizzard of claims, counterclaims and lawsuits, as well as anguish among South Bend’s minority residents over whether an ambitious white mayor had sided with white police officers against a black chief. The day after Mr. Boykins’s dismissal, he was applauded at a gathering of 100 officers, council members and clergy. The events played out against a backdrop of frustration among some African-Americans that they have not benefited equally from an economic resurgence in South Bend, which Mr. Buttigieg extols in his presidential bid.

As Mr. Buttigieg seeks the Democratic nomination in a party whose base is anchored by minority voters, his handling of Mr. Boykins’ dismissal and its messy aftermath raise questions whether the mayor either misunderstood or mishandled sensitivities surrounding race and policing in the place he knew best, a city which is 37 percent black and Latino.

“It felt stomach-churning,” Mr. Buttigieg recalled of the night of the 2012 protest, speaking in an interview. “To know that that same day, we were at what even then I understood was going to be the beginning of an incredibly painful and divisive moment of race relations in my city.”

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