Chief Darryl Boykins signed a document in 2013 saying he was aware of no evidence of illegal activity by the police officers whose calls were captured on the department’s wiretapped line, and no evidence they had used a racist word against him. This admission has sat in the case record ever since. Now after the city has lost its fourteen-year fight over the police tapes and spent more than three million taxpayer dollars, South Bend’s Common Council is weighing whether to appeal anyway.
The case began with a single telephone line, the line ending in 6031. Around 2004, a captain named Rick Bishop asked to have his line recorded after he received threatening calls. He consented to the recording of his own conversations, and that recording was lawful. A person may agree to have his own calls recorded.
Bishop changed offices in 2010, and the line did not follow him. It moved to the desk of Captain Brian Young, who used it without being told it was recorded. Every call he made on it was recorded. Young did not consent, and neither did the people who called him.
In early 2011, the department’s communications director, Karen DePaepe, was troubleshooting the recording system when she heard Young’s voice on a line she believed belonged to someone else. She kept listening. At the direction of then-Chief Boykins, she copied nine conversations onto five cassette tapes. A federal investigation followed. Boykins was demoted. DePaepe was fired. In 2012, the Common Council subpoenaed the recordings, demanding to know what was on them.
The City refused to release them without a court order, and the officers whose voices had been captured went to court to keep them sealed. One question remains in the fourteen years since: were the recordings legal? They were not, and the reasoning is the heart of the case.
Wiretap law, state and federal, forbids recording private conversations without consent or a warrant. The recording of 6031 began with Bishop’s consent, but that consent was his, not the phone number’s, and it did not pass to whoever inherited the line. Once Young inherited the line, no one on the line had agreed to be recorded, and no warrant covered it. The City could have claimed the recordings were made in the ordinary course of business, as a department that records all its lines by routine may, but South Bend did not record individual officers’ lines by routine. It only recorded them when an officer asked. Young never asked.
On May 28, 2026, Judge Jamie C. Woods ruled that the recordings violated both the Indiana Wiretap Act and the Federal Wiretap Act. Woods found the department had known the line was recorded the entire time, that Boykins reviewed the list of recorded lines every year, and that the line 6031 continued to be recorded without Young’s consent. Judge Woods ordered that the tapes be destroyed and barred the City, the Council, and any administration that follows from disclosing them, using them, or referring to them in any proceeding. The destruction is stayed while any appeal is pending.
That is the ruling the Council may appeal. Before it spends more to do so, the public it represents should know what the recordings produced.
They produced nothing. For years, the tapes have been described by some as holding misconduct. Federal prosecutors reviewed the matter in 2012 and brought no charges. A special prosecutor reviewed it again in 2015 and brought none. And DePaepe, the one person who listened to the tapes and copied them, testified under oath to what came of them. No criminal charges against any officer. No Internal Affairs charges. No discipline. No demotion. The only two people who lost anything were DePaepe, who lost her job, and Boykins, who lost his rank. She testified that several of the men long tied to the case, Tim Corbett among them, were not on the cassettes at all.
Boykins answered the same question with his signature. In the November 2013 settlement of his own lawsuit, he and the City stated together that neither was aware of any evidence the recorded officers had done anything illegal, or any evidence they had used a racist word against him. He also represented that he held no copies of the recordings, and no transcripts or notes drawn from them. He signed it on November 12, 2013. The City paid him and his attorney seventy-five thousand dollars to reach the agreement.
The cost is a matter of record, and it has climbed for years. By early 2015, the litigation had cost taxpayers around 1.6 million dollars in legal fees and settlements. By early 2019, the figure neared two million. Both totals came before the case reached the Indiana Court of Appeals, before the state Supreme Court declined to hear it, before it resumed in 2023, and before last December’s trial. I am told the total now exceeds three million dollars.
The spending was a series of choices, made in the open. In January 2019, after a judge urged the parties to make an extraordinary effort to settle, the Council voted nine to nothing to reject any agreement mediation might produce. It chose to keep fighting. The bill has grown since.
No one would have authorized this lawsuit in 2012 had they been told it would one day cost twenty million dollars. The figure is absurd, and its absurdity makes the point: somewhere below twenty million dollars lies a number the public would also have refused, a line past which the cost outruns the cause. What is the limit? Ten million? Five million? Four million? The total has crossed three million dollars. The Council has never named its limit, and the taxpayers funding the lawsuit have never been asked theirs.
An appeal will most likely not change where the tapes are headed. A judgment built on a trial judge’s findings of fact is difficult to overturn, because appellate courts do not reweigh the evidence and reverse a trial judge only when he is plainly wrong.
The Council met in executive session on June 3 to weigh its next step. Council President Canneth Lee has said the ruling disappointed him and that he is considering what comes next. The public that has paid for fourteen years of this was not in the room or consulted.
Fourteen years. More than three million dollars. Nothing suggests another million dollars would change the outcome, or reveal anything the chief at the center of it did not already disclaim, in writing, more than a decade ago.
Logan Foster
Logan Foster is the founder and editor of Redress South Bend, an independent news outlet covering local government, courts, and public institutions in South Bend and St. Joseph County, Indiana. He reports from primary documents: public records requests, court filings, state audit reports, and campaign finance disclosures. His reporting has examined city and school district payments made without competitive bidding, school board spending, and the records of candidates in county races. Redress South Bend obtained the South Bend Police Department's ShotSpotter coverage map after the department initially denied public access. The outlet is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Online News Association. Reach him at info@redresssouthbend.com
