As South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigeig continues campaigning in Iowa, six people were reported shot in just 24 hours, the latest illustration of a trend of increased shootings in the mayor’s city.
Four people were shot on Sunday, and two were shot on Monday, according to the South Bend Police Department.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Chief of Police Scott Ruszkowski told local news channel WNDU when asked about the spike in shootings. “I mean we can keep rolling back many of the segments that I’ve sat here … I feel like we are chasing our tail — or a broken record.”
The city is experiencing a roughly 40 percent spike in people hit by gunshots compared to 2018, according to the South Bend Tribune.
In June, ten people were shot and one person was killed in a shooting at Kelly’s Pub.
The City of South Bend announced plans to hire a national consulting firm to review the police department after a highly publicized police shooting of a black man accused of burglarizing cars. The city council authorized $180,000 for the study.
Since the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Buttigieg has ramped up his criticism of President Trump over mass shootings, blaming domestic white nationalist terrorism for causing it.
“We can’t keep pretending that this is just random or that this is something that we can’t confront,” Buttigieg said on Fox News Sunday in August.
The South Bend Fraternal Order of Police remains critical of Buttigieg’s administration, suggesting that the rise of violence is a result of a failure to support law enforcement.
“It’s crazy, it’s like the Wild West out there,” South Bend Fraternal Order of Police President Harvey Mills said to Fox News in an interview Tuesday about the increased shootings.
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