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I was born in South Bend and even went to a public neighborhood set of schools in this community, graduating high school from John Adams. We were a generation that was somewhat integrated, not perfectly so, but there was room in our hearts and minds. All told, we may have had more failures than successes at times, but we made real friends from groups of people that were not homogenous, and we did this through legitimate friendships and without mandatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) seminars.
I think our parents’ generation was more integrated, at least in the working-class world. I believe this because when I go to the funerals of my parents’ friends, if the deceased is a Black person from the South Bend area, the mourners are a mixed group, with about three-fourths of those paying respects and or attending services being the same race as the deceased and about one fourth being either white with occasional folks from Spanish speaking communities and those who came here for asylum as refugees from places in Asia and elsewhere also attending in that one quarter. If the deceased is primarily from white folk, then those same stats flip flop just about in the working-class funerals. Is it because among working-class people, we knew how to work on the lines together, that you always loaned neighbors sugar or eggs, and that families down on their luck you made sure to give as much as you could while not making them feel like it was charity? I don’t know.
The funerals of my own age group, I don’t have enough data yet (thankfully) – but also, a lot of that group moved away from South Bend by choice and by necessity for work opportunities or to be with loved ones they might have met in the military or colleges or elsewhere – I doubt our funerals will be quite as integrated and unless there is some redress of significant issues of how schools seem to be re-segregating through ‘choice’ measures and extended privatization of education, some authentic job opportunities that get us all working together again, and more we’re in for a world that looks more like 1924 than I suppose lots of people would care to acknowledge their own complicity in helping to recreate.
Segregation, jobs, dilapidated buildings, and educational issues continue to be on the problems list for ol’ South Bend, or do we now call it South Bend - Elkhart as local officials seem to have come to without any real community input on that topic? What about our good neighbors in Mishawaka or the moniker of Michiana that grabbed the old WNDU television audience region and transcended artificial state lines? I worry about these issues that cannot seemingly get discussed, let alone fully addressed with openness – even the midwestern savior of the Democratic party, the ‘wunderkid’ for those fans of Ted Lasso who might draw their own comparisons of hope and departure, Mayor Pete Buttigieg himself, could not S.O.C. (Save our City) – sure Mayor Pete made good progress. He had the legitimate claim of being ‘from here,’ but unlike a lot of people I grew up with in this community, apparently Mayor Pete’s family, though excellent as could be in terms of everything, didn’t teach that one ever-true lesson of the region, follow through and work until the job is done. I’m willing to give Secretary Pete the benefit of the doubt that he is getting ‘the job’ done and seeing it through on another level. Still, I wish he hadn’t left Dr. Mueller, an oceanographer, here far from the ocean to ‘continue the job.’
I know Dr. Mueller feels safe anywhere at all times in South Bend, and frankly, that’s part of the problem. He is secure in most places in South Bend as a white fella’ as people likely will not harm him permanently because harming white people out of their own neighborhoods brings uninvited attention and trouble into other neighborhoods. He is statistically safer than young people who live in the tougher neighborhoods in our town precisely because he’s not from there – as an oceanographer, you’d think he’d know all about being a ‘fish out of water’ and people working to get that fish back into the water and away from people because if something does happen to that fish on your watch, then your community might be held responsible. So if something does happen to said fish, people in your neighborhood know they had better eat it so that nobody ever knows it was there in the first place. But frankly, nobody wants to eat anti-social white fish left behind by their school(mate) and even their best friend, even when that friend is moving with a residential address closer to a great lake and a physical address much closer to the ocean.
I’m not saying Dr. Mayor cannot do the job; I’m saying I’m not sure he knows what his job is in this community. I’m going to go ahead and say that probably nobody in our community knows what his job is and that's problematic. I feel bad for this once and still acting mayor as sometimes he seems to be constantly putting out fires instead of stopping our community from collecting kindling to spread all over the all too still hot ashes in this region, only to create fires until the whole city is an inferno that destroys itself by investing in police, punishment, and not clean-up, infrastructure, and hometown jobs. If you want to know what sixty years of that kind of policy will look like in South Bend, just visit Gary, Indiana – who knew that someone presumably with a doctorate, Professor Harold Hill, would not be the most incredible con man ever to appear in Gary, Indiana, Gary, but that it would be a string of public officials supporting Professor Hill’s or in this case real people’s outside expertise and policies and promises that would lead to the total ruin Gary experiences and still suffer from in the present.
To be a success, the mayor should first try ‘inside’ the community knowledge for putting out the fires and take them seriously, instead of coming and appearing bored while he listens to panels of community members who are often so traumatized from their town’s neglect that they cannot fully articulate good solutions that have occurred to them in the past. As he puts out the proverbial fires, he should ask community members for insight and help and if those fires also had crimes built into them, there should be careful social work done and the opportunity to work with truth, justice, and a reconciliation committee instead of the justice system so that harm might be reconciled and that the person doing the harm has the opportunity to be part of larger solutions.
While on occasion our town tries in fits and starts to be better and do better, our government, especially the mayor, keeps trying business as usual or doing it the way that is working for peer communities like Grand Rapids, Dayton, and Kalamazoo, but here’s the thing – we’re not those places, and we need different solutions and not the opportunity to follow a playbook that worked for an entirely different community. Repeating past mistakes is precisely what got South Bend its classic ‘rustbelt’ designation that seemed to enrage a young Pete Buttigieg enough to give up a healthy six-figure salary with lots of perks and move back into the U-93 listening zone of his youth, at least temporarily. I’m not sure Mueller is in the right places at the correct times to get his job started, let alone to fulfill any promises made by my favorite person on Insta’s husband (shout-out @chasten.buttigieg and you’re a close second @monica_lewinsky).
Why is our mayor not an ex-officio member of the Common Council? Why is the mayor not an ex-officio or tiebreaker on our school board? Why do we not have his daily calendar published and easily accessible online? How can we redress our government when they’re in hiding, or we have three minutes to explain a complicated idea or concern and after we voice that concern, members of the council might hustle towards us to attempt violence on our physical bodies? (Talking about VP of the Common Council, Sheila Niezgodski, enraged over words from a member of the press (full disclosure, her anger was directed at the editor of this very publication). How can that council member ever be considered working for the good of our community again? How can citizens feel heard if that is the kind of reaction they might receive from a powerful political family member in our community? Why are we not all up in arms about Niezgodski attacking the First Amendment of the Constitution, both in freedom of speech during the three-minute allotment and also from the same amendment, freedom of the press? Will our very common council let this Springer-esque behavior continue as it threatens the very idea of a civilized and functioning government or that citizens have any rights whatsoever? Why has Niezgodski not been charged with some crime? Stalking with malicious intent? Or a crime against her own oath of office?
Why is Niezgodski and company concerned about fair questions about self-dealing instead of just providing line-item budgets that are incredibly transparent and easily accessible online? We say we’re spending all sorts of money in our community for greater transparency. Is there not an IUSB, Holy Cross, Notre Dame, St. Mary’s, or Bethel student or a class at one or across all of these places who/that could get a budget and mayoral transparency website up and running? (Could our town then not sell such a product to other towns?) Can we not keep this work in our community by dreaming of what we want and giving residents the first chance at bidding on the job, either as private programmers or full-on companies? Every dollar we spend that is paid to a place not inside our city is money that will never come back to our community after all, so let’s invest in, well, us, here in South Bend.
I respect City Clerk Bianca Tirado for admitting that she was in over her head and for asking for help. It’s a smart thing to do if you need help, ask for it – if we truly want people to get better, we need to create environments where people can fairly ask for what they need or for additional training, and we should support that in government and all jobs, creating that kind of trust is a kind of transparency. Now, blaming the person that left before you is partisan foolishness and bad school-yard manners, but we’ll allow it for the moment – if she gets the job done and provides us a work plan on how the person or people she wants to hire will keep up to date with the current business of her office, while also going backward and getting caught up on anything that was left behind – but since, Tirado was not the City Clerk when many of those former minutes were not produced appropriately, maybe we just need to settle for the audio visual versions being put online, instead of spending money, and move forward, as since Tirado was not the City Clerk, it would be senseless for her to sign off on those records. It would seem that it should be illegal, too. The current government cannot go back and retroactively create documents for past governments and sign off on them as official (though I get that the St. Joseph County Courts think they’re clever by covering their mistakes in this very manner with blanket retroactive court orders, a gross abuse of their power and full-on corruption, but most people don’t have time to pay attention to them or even know what they do) otherwise, we would have the nightmare of every government rewriting all of a place’s history through redoing the books – but if we need those records in a particular manner, great, let’s get that and add a page that they were created far after the fact and thus are not really primary source or legal copies/materials and let us move onward in our town, the new clerk can sign off on some statement on the front of each of those recordings, post them, and be done, cost to our town, $0, lesson learned from not getting the last person to do their job, priceless.
Likewise, if Dr. Mueller needs help with his job, let’s allocate some funds to help him or get him trained, or to help him with active listening exercises, or even lessons in how to not just feign interest but to show real interest and curiosity. If he still cannot figure out what his job is, let’s remember that we can vote for someone else. They do not even have to be from one of the two parties we’ve been duped into believing have answers or even know what the job is. After all, with his degree, he can go back to the sea, pulling golf balls out of beached whales blow holes, and measuring the depths of the angry seas. However, let’s be transparent—let’s see where and how he does his job and when and give him a chance to finish his term well. We don’t necessarily have to have a mayor; we could have a figurehead mayor who works with a powerful City Controller. There are examples of this; for instance, Rehoboth Beach, DE, just bought themselves an answer man who is a known worker to help put their community back on course. We could do this if we chose to as well, but we should only do that if we believe we have no homegrown talent. I think we do have some tremendous homegrown talent, if not unconventional, talent right here in and from South Bend.
If you read former Council Member Henry Davis, Jr.’s campaign ideas, he did something other candidates have not done: he gave us ideas instead of just talking points – you may not like his ideas, but if the options are people trying to be thoughtful and create versus those following the playbook that brought us to the current moment, I would at least consider a person with ideas before using a strange stylus to push buttons at the voting both this next and in all subsequent elections (I miss pulling the lever being our grand analogy). We’ve got Notre Dame law graduate and John Adams High School graduate Rachel Friend in Boulder, Colorado, just finishing up time on their City Council and serving as interim Mayor. If you haven’t seen some of the great work they’ve done, go out there and look around, and while you’re there, see if you can draft Rachel Friend to run for mayor in her hometown, her spouse has some portable career so it wouldn’t be hard on their family to come home, I believe, in fact, he’s a fancy surgeon. What about Brenden Mullen, a vet who stood up to a rapidly changing congressional district and almost pulled off a big win? Let’s call him home to govern. Social media and the South Bend Tribune reported recently that the calmest man in governance has returned to work full-time as a VP at the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County; why not try and draft Mr. Aaron Perri, known on Insta as ‘The Place Guy’ for a job that he knows a lot about as one of the only high-level city employees to work under multiple mayors and show successful continuity. Or someone should talk to old-school workhorse Derek Dieter about his long-term plans if you want someone of a different political ideology. Or perhaps former East Side Little League champion and one of the Hadaway Hooper squad from a better era of Indiana basketball, Jason Kelly. If you prefer somebody who looks mayoral on the brochure, Gavin Ferlic was literally bred, not unlike his handsome English Crème Retriever, to be and look like a mayor. Or Common Council President Sharon McBride or member Rachel Tomas Morgan, or maybe an academic who grew up here like Dr. Ryan Clark? He’s not an Oceanographer, but his Ph.D. is every bit as real! Clark worked at a family-owned Dunkin’ Donuts on Lincolnway in high school, graduated from St. Joe, and teaches at Notre Dame; he almost certainly has never once thought about being a mayor, which might make him better than average at it or if you wanted someone even better, Clark’s partner and spouse, Kyra Clark, would do the job with such integrity that we might vote her in for life.
Better yet, ignore that litany of names, but get them in a room and have them talk about why they do not want to be mayor or would turn it down or not run and then start there for creating a job advertisement for our next mayor – this would be the Council’s job to do or maybe IUSB’s or others, but let’s talk to them about why they do or do not want the job, what is in the way of exceptional people wanting this job in our hometown?
Let’s spend money on a few meetings of those on our South Bend mayoral draftqueens&kings.com list or even ask them to design what they think the mayor’s job in a town like ours should be instead of expensive technology for the police in our community. After all, do body cameras make us safer, or do they serve as a menace as we rely on them only to be refused access to their data? Or to have to relive traumas to get the data – even the structure of getting records from the South Bend Police makes it so you have to walk a good bit into the building as they funnel traffic so nobody can wait at the door or nearby to give you a ride, it’s called policing by design in some places, and it’s an architectural design way of keeping the public from accessing records. The narrow road immediately in front of the building is to keep traffic moving and not allow people to go in quickly and get what they need.
Even the proximity to the jail might be traumatic for victims of police abuse or negligence or other violent crimes, so designing the facility to be less user-friendly seems Kafka-esque or, you know, just a terrible way to treat citizens.
Similarly, asking people to submit to violations of their Fourth Amendment rights and submit to a search at the County-City building to gain access to any governmental services seems cuckoo for Coco-Puffs. Yes, ostensibly, there is a courtroom accessible from that building, so instead of arguing with a gaggle of goofy judges, let’s put the metal detector right there by the courtroom (and only when the court is open) and let the judge’s fiefdoms reign for now while allowing us full and unfettered access to the fully elected portions of or government.
These rights in the Constitution are given to us with purpose and reason – and transparency of government is part of that, keeping a police state or monarchy from rising is part of that – and while it seems unlikely that those things will happen imminently, they will happen if we let tyrants be tyrants or to quote my DJ brother, ‘tyrants gonna tyrant’ and give our rights away. Just because it’s convenient does not mean we should give our rights away; in fact, it is incumbent that every generation re-earn and fight for their freedoms, lest we become complacent.
Seriously, if we learned nothing from the Broadway hit “Hamilton” by genius Lin Manuel Miranda, we should know that “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness We fought for these ideals, we shouldn't settle for less” as “these are wise words, enterprising men quote ‘em, Don't act surprised, you guys, ‘cause I wrote ‘em (ow).’ However, like the out-of-date and style Jefferson in this musical, our Common Council needs a Hamiltonian redressing of their own, “Thomas, that was a real nice declaration, welcome to the present, we’re running a real nation, would you like to join us, or stay mellow doin’ whatever the hell it is you do in Monticello?’ It’s time for our governments in this town and elsewhere to stop using the same outdated playbook and ‘being Mellow’ doing things that may have made profits from, but immorally, like the things they were doin’ down in Monticello – we have an actual city and we need authentic and innovative governance and the clock is ticking on this for sure and if we don’t move on it soon we won’t be able to equate our town in any manner with Jefferson or Hamilton on Broadway our in real life, nor will we hear the whispers from Katharine Hepburn that our town seems wonderful and romantic, ‘South Bend, it sounds like dancing’ she says so wistfully in her 1940 film about something completely different, but we’ll be forced to hear forever and worse live the whining of that other Broadway musical that points to what happens when town officials are duped, and they then sell the bigger lie to citizens to hide their mistakes, yes, Meredith Wilson’s whining and worse, Gary, Indiana, Gary Indy, not Louisiana, Paris France, but Gary, Indiana…”
This is our fate as a community if the government doesn’t quickly learn to serve and protect its people but continues to be less transparent while spending more money on efforts that government officials and police officials tell us will make things more transparent. We invested heavily in the subscription-based service for Shot-Tracker, yet the town does not really want to share that data as one FOIA request recently went ignored, and another claimed that asking for all the data was too difficult and was then rejected at the time by City Attorney Aladean DeRose’s office. Having all the data would help in many ways, so why do we pay a huge annual subscription but are refused access to it as the public? Why isn’t that data available as an app for our phones in near real-time? (Real-time does create some safety issues) Why doesn’t that same free city-wide app provide police scanners, text access to 9-11, 3-11, suicide hotlines, abuse hotlines, elder care social workers, and more?
Why are people not given the laws they are accused of violating in writing via email or text for every offense they are accused of in our community? More people have cell phones than have addresses in our town, so sending digital copies would save money, can be tracked and shown to be received, and would allow citizens to know what to defend against when they are cited with a violation. Are we averse to saving money? It seems like any politician would favor this. Is it just not happening because the politicians in our town and in most places still can’t work their own cell phones? If that’s the case, let’s get them training and help, too; it’s time to catch up and grow up in our town.
That same app could use open AI to cross-reference local laws and procedures (which are very different from laws) with our state laws so that police and citizens can know when the state has already ruled to supersede some customary law (practice) in a place so we can all get on with our lives? This saves taxpayers money, helps out the judges, and allows any literate police force to check within minutes as to what the actual law is, even if it is not what they think it is in ‘their’ town. We need police to understand the basic structure and relationships of city, state, and federal laws and know how to deescalate and do so quickly, rather than policing by ego and force and often both things at once, this will save lives and keep us safe – thanks to ‘auditors’ like our hometown Youtuber Freedom 2 Film or regional favorite Famously Unfamous we are getting better ‘coverage’ of some of our officials and while I might not personally do things the way these ‘auditors’ do, I will stand up for them to have that right until the end of days. It’s important that we hear views from multiple sources and perspectives, and a lot of these auditors have their own creation stories in radical injustice and violations, and they’re sincerely trying to stick up for everyone – and it’s vital that we remember we’re running a real community and that as the saying goes, ‘freedom isn’t free’ – or to misquote and use them wildly incorrectly the 80’s hip hop crew would say, ‘you gotta fight, for your right’ to be free (and party, I suppose too).
Why aren’t people involved in any engagement with police immediately sent all the body camera or car footage available and not in a redacted manner? If they had been there, they could have seen all of those people, things, and other redacted items anyway, so why not turn it over with haste to people with the disclaimer that it might not be a perfect representation of events? Why not have a censor-created report every time an officer unholsters a weapon, and that report be sent out immediately to a ‘transparency hub’ and/or app? I’d like to know when the police are touching their guns, too! Is there really nobody at any of the local colleges interested in studying the psychology of police feeling the need to touch their weapon and also unholster it? Think of the technology our town could sell to the world if IUSB-Notre Dame – St. Mary’s – Bethel and Andrews University built the tech, studied the psychology of the officers touching and pulling their weapons and the psychology of those that witness the touching and pulling their weapons – my goodness we could lead in this arena of research and policing, and we could then help retrain those police brains on when it is appropriate to unholster their weapons or tap them with their fingers – we can watch the pupils dilate with stress hormones when people see the officer tapping the end of their deadly weapon and then think about how that impacts decision making, we could lead from our town and make money from that leadership and research as well– we just haven’t been creative or smart enough to use our resources in this town and to force the private institutions in our regional communities to recognize that there are people outside of the gold gilded private zip code. Still, I could be convinced that is a step too far – but some of the lack of transparency and not sharing of data is about not correctly training our officers, so let’s get rid of a mobile license plate tracker and instead pay for better training, pay for young people interested in law enforcement to get degrees in that field and experience along the way, and create an expectation of owing our town services by homegrown and home trained officers (and a similar program for social workers too, and class revenue could be cycled straight through IUSB as could the class work) who got to be a part of the development of some of the technologies that lead to deescalating before pulling out weapons. I know that there are milliseconds between life and death for officers, but there is the exact same amount of time between life and death for those they are stopping, and the exact same amount of time to make a choice to de-escalate as well.
As the baby boomers get older, we’re going to need a massive onslaught of Social Workers, so let’s not pay the shot-tracker fee for four years and get 8-10 young people from our community degrees from any state college for free – and if they go to IUSB all the better and we’ll give them perks for that – so that they can begin helping seniors in our community know about resources and plugging them into resources – and so that they can show up at Council meetings and report on the situation in housing and other issues that our dear elders face increasingly without appropriate services and in many situations with their own children having left the area. This kind of transparency is extinguishing fires and keeping us from building on explosive issues, which is what the mayor and council should be doing at every juncture.
We need to change the name of the Common Council to the City Council and soon, as we need them to stop being common, like the streetfighter turned council member, and to be instead extraordinary and not take redress from the public as personal, but instead take it as an opportunity to be more transparent and to ask the same of their family members, business owners, and everyone in our community. We’ve had a common council for far too long. If we have any hope of S.O.C. (Saving our City), we need to put out the distress call for extraordinary and not common things to happen, and that will start with the Mayor finding their way to City meetings at several levels but especially at City Council meetings and School Board meetings and holding those that work with him accountable for their behaviors during and following such meetings and being as transparent as one possibly can be – secrecy is the enemy of progress and the co-conspirator of the criminal and complicit alike.
Signed, Rexroth E.F. Washington
720 W. Washington Street – 2nd Floor Units
South Bend, Ind. Rexroth will be an ongoing contributor in our Opinion Section; if you would like to reach him directly for comments or ideas, please email him at Rexroth.E.F.Washington@gmail.com
The views and opinions expressed in submissions, opinions, and letters are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Redress South Bend. Redress South Bend does not endorse or oppose any views presented in any submission.