There is a straight, clear line running from a Penn High School student reporter using a racial slur during a live broadcast of a Riley High School basketball game to our community’s fifteen-year failure to disclose the South Bend Police Department tapes.
That same dark line can be tied directly to the Democratic nominee for St. Joseph County Sheriff, Scott Ruszkowski, in his role as South Bend Police chief, characterizing officer, Samuel Chaput, violently pinning a young girl to the ground at a downtown McDonald’s as “minimal force.” An onlooker’s video clearly showed no attempt to de-escalate, yet the Police Review Board offered a non-decision, and police spokesperson Ashley O’Chapp openly complained about the “unpaid time” it took to provide public answers, absolutely misunderstanding her salaried position. The lack of police civic compassion was palpable. The stance was purely defensive, confusing “Serve and Protect” with protecting police jobs and political aspirations rather than the citizens of our community.
The line traces directly to the 2019 police shooting of Eric Logan, a Black man, by a white officer whose body camera was not operating. Shielded by qualified immunity, the officer was cleared by a special prosecutor, and the family’s wrongful death lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge in 2021. Today, that line runs through our school districts’ discipline statistics, where the hollow process of “further study” is once again underway in South Bend.
Watch the line meander backward to September 20, 1968, and the mass walkout at Washington High School, organized by the Student Organization for Unity and Leadership (S.O.U.L.) over the lack of Black student representation. Their protest became a textbook case study in de facto segregation—schools that integrated physically, but not in the systemic ways that actually mattered to families and their educational futures.
You can see it as a yellow line. Decades after Indiana outlawed school segregation in the 1940s and the Supreme Court ordered desegregation with “all deliberate speed,” South Bend had to be sued into compliance. A 1980 federal lawsuit explicitly charged the city with purposefully maintaining a segregated system. To avoid litigation, South Bend implemented a busing program that forced Black students into significantly longer commutes. Those same yellow lines fueled “white flight,” driving the rapid growth of surrounding suburban townships away from integrating schools.
Follow the line further back to Black residents paying taxes for public facilities they were legally barred from using, like the Engman Public Natatorium in the 1920s and 30s. Make the line bright orange to show public parks and schoolyards stripped of basketball courts in predominantly Black neighborhoods, or bright green to trace the historical lack of park upgrades, sidewalks, curbs, and canopy trees in those same areas.
This historical throughline is mapped with devastating clarity in the March 4, 2026, report from the city’s Reparations Committee, available here. Despite recent pushback from at least one city official attempting to restrict copies of the document, the report lays bare a well-researched history of localized oppression. These lines must be preserved if we ever hope for change.
Instead, these police tapes continue to draw battle lines. They previously halted Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, forcing him to return home to confront long-standing racialized violence in our community. Today, those very tapes face total destruction by order of the St. Joseph County Court.
As a community, we must draw a line in the sand and not stand for the destruction of these tapes. Our Common Council, local historical associations, and national truth and reconciliation groups must use every legal and creative mechanism available to preserve these recordings. Whether by passing local preservation ordinances, reading the transcripts into the public record during council sessions, or drafting a preservation law to release the tapes on a particular date, we must work within the law to ensure the community is not locked out of the conversation.
It is vital that these tapes survive. We must hear what was said so we know what needs to be apologized for, what retraining is required, and what justice we must continue to demand. We must learn where we are as a community so that we can grow, heal, and ultimately transcend.
Sojourner Truth reportedly said, “I cannot read, but I can hear.” We need the chance to hear these tapes to understand how deep the wounds in our community run, and exactly who has worked to hide them. Like the broadcasted slurs of a high school student, these tapes diagnose the systemic disease that continues to divide us. We can trace these lines to fix the problem or look away while the courts permanently bury a monument to systemic injustice.
Before we can draw new, bold lines for our community’s future, we must untangle the web of lines from our past. We must hear the tapes. To destroy them tells our youth—at PHM and across the region—that we intend to turn a deaf ear to institutional racism. It proves we are more interested in pointing to the sawdust in one another’s eyes than removing the straight-line plank from our own, an hypocrisy that only allows racial violence and prejudice to persist.
© 2026 Brian S Collier. All opinions are those of the author. The author reserves all Rights and copyrights. To request permission to reprint any or all of this article, contact info@redresssouthbend.com.
Reprinted with permission of the author by Redress South Bend.
All opinions, research, and views in this piece are attributed to the author and are not necessarily the thoughts or opinions of Redress South Bend.
