Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  A college classmate, elected to local office in another state, once surprised me with the comment, “Sometimes I wish we still had a royal family in America.” I asked what he was talking about, and he explained: it would be nice if a royal family were available to handle things like cutting ribbons and waving to people in parades, so that elected policymakers like us could focus on the real work of legislation and administration. I thought of him often while standing alongside other officials at some event where I had no substantive role but to be present, and imagined what it would be like to just outsource that part of the job to some municipal prince or princess, or perhaps a “lord mayor” in the English tradition, so I could stay at the office and work on a way to improve trash pickup or eliminate some duplicative paperwork from our tax abatement applications. It seemed like standing there blinking in my suit, which required no real skill or intention, was a waste of time. Plus, the mental picture of a local official consumed with photo ops evoked the image of mayoring that I liked least—that cartoon concept of the sash-wearing, cigar-chomping petty official, with a puffed-out chest and a shit-eating grin, like Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons.

  BY THE TIME I STOOD at an outdoor podium one warm May evening in 2015 and raised a glass to the city of South Bend in honor of her 150th birthday, I had gone through a full transformation in my regard for ceremony. By then, my old attitude seemed narrow. Growing into the job of mayor entailed grasping that the symbolic role given to me was no less substantive than the power of policy—if deployed wisely. It was a gradual conversion that began, like most important growth, in a moment of pain: the aftermath of a murder.

  My first year in office, 2012, was our city’s deadliest year of gun violence in a decade. By the end of 2012, there would be eighteen homicides, double the previous year. In 2013, I would assemble community leaders, engage experts, and initiate a new evidence-based strategy for dealing with the gang-related violence that had been driving this spike in crime. But in my first weeks and months of office we didn’t have a clear sense of how to deal with the increase, and each violent incident made me feel powerless. Every time my phone vibrated with a new alert, I asked myself how we had failed to prevent the latest shooting.

  Amid all the bad news of early 2012, one murder got my attention even more than the others. It was the first double homicide we’d seen in years, and both of the victims were only nineteen. Then, a few months later, an eighteen-year-old was killed in an unrelated incident at the same address. I wondered what could possibly be going on at this residential corner to make it so violent. So, on the quiet Saturday morning after that crime, I drove to the location, a few blocks from my boyhood home on College Street. Stepping out of my Taurus and standing alone on the lawn of the house, I tried to imbibe the energy of the place, seeking some kind of insight or understanding by virtue of being there. But the scene seemed totally ordinary. There was no sinister aura hanging in the air—just a regular house with white vinyl siding on a small corner lot.

  A tired-looking man wearing a football sweatshirt walked toward me on the sidewalk, and then stopped next to me. I think he recognized me. I explained what I was doing there, not that it was really explainable, and he said that he was a relative of the victim. Then a couple more people appeared on the sidewalk, and a few more stepped out of two cars. Family, friends, and neighbors were converging, and soon it was clear that I had inadvertently crashed a kind of impromptu wake. I joined the neighbors in the headshaking, muttered condolences, and tried to think of something meaningful to say. Then one of the men pointed toward a car pulling up on the cross street. It was the mother of the victim, he said, and he asked if I wanted to go speak to her.

  Honestly, I didn’t.

  It’s not that I didn’t wish to comfort her or be helpful, it was just that I didn’t know how. I had expected to be here alone—and being among these mourners already felt like intruding. Besides, I had no relevant skills for this situation; nothing from my McKinsey training or college education was going to be useful here. I had no knowledge of grief counseling, no qualification for dealing with victims of this kind of trauma.

  The grieving mother stepped out of the car, composed but devastated, leaning on a relative for support as she walked up the slight slope of the small lawn, not because she wasn’t physically able but in case she became overwhelmed with sorrow and unable to stand. And I realized then that, of course, I was going to have to go talk to her.

  I approached her, and she recognized me. I shook her hand, which seemed like an absurd thing to do. I tried to think of something comforting to say, something about how the whole community was holding her in our hearts.

  “I know you,” she said. Then, out of nowhere:

  “Didn’t you go to Saint Joe?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I went to Saint Joe, too. So we have something in common!”

  Small talk felt unnatural in the midst of grief—but isn’t that what we need, sometimes, when grieving? Just someone to talk to, about nothing in particular. Nothing profound. Just being there.

  I don’t remember the particulars of the conversation. I’m sure it was awkward, and consisted mostly of generalities and obvious expressions of sympathy, a pitter-patter that I would have thought of as inappropriate for the situation before I became more practiced in consolation and mourning.

  Yet later, occasionally, I would run into her or another relative who would let me know how much that conversation had meant. It was humbling, since I had not said anything memorable or used any particular skill. But this was the point: you do not necessarily console through the wisdom of your words, especially as a public official. It was a powerful, if grim, early lesson in the fact that as an elected official, I had become a symbol. What mattered to her was that I showed up. In contrast to my student or consulting days, the value was not in the cleverness of what I had to say, but simply the fact of my being there. Not that I, Pete, was there, but the mayor was there—a walking symbol of the city, and therefore a signifier of the fact that the city cared about her loss.

  CARING, OF COURSE, is not enough. As the count of shootings rose, I became more practiced and capable at consoling bereaved mothers, and utterly sick of doing so. Every time, there were the usual cathartic statements about how we as a community won’t tolerate this kind of violence, “never again,” and so forth. But what would it actually take? Attending the funeral of a teenager whose mother worked as a secretary for the city, I asked myself what would have to happen for us to change the trajectory of violent crime in the community. The police were policing, preachers were preaching, the politicians were condemning, and yet here I was at a funeral for a fifteen-year-old boy, and I knew he likely wouldn’t be the last teenager we would lose that year.

  Somewhere in the course of my search for answers, I learned of the Boston Miracle. In the late 1990s, during a similar crisis, community leaders tried a new approach to dealing with the gang-related violence that was causing an epidemic of youth homicide. Using rigorous analysis to map group associations, a team of researchers joined with prosecutors, law enforcement, social service providers, and faith leaders to identify and contact the people most likely to kill or be victimized. The young men (nearly always men) were gathered, in person, for a “call-in.” Here, officials and community members would promise to concentrate all law enforcement attention on anyone involved in the next group or gang to be involved in a killing—and also offer social services for those prepared to make a change before it came to that. Sometimes misunderstood from the right as an amnesty or from the left as a crackdown, the strategy’s true core is in recognizing that would-be shooters are also people. Leaving aside the handful of people who are actually pathological, most of them just make decisions based on incentives and influences around them.

  The overall message was, “We’ll help you if you let us and we’ll stop you if you make us,” and it was backed by agencies committed to keeping their promises on both enforcement and support. Read
ing David Kennedy’s book Don’t Shoot, which explains the approach in detail, I learned of the dramatic drop in violent crime in some cities that successfully executed the strategy.

  Under various names including “Operation Ceasefire” and “Group Violence Intervention,” versions of this approach were being used more and more widely around America, and I decided to apply it in South Bend. Controversially, I hired an outsider from Massachusetts to fill a vacancy in the position of police chief, and with him convened an Anti-Violence Commission consisting of relevant players from around South Bend. Mixing the symbolic and the substantive, we sat around a big square table at the West Side’s Martin Luther King Center, on public display acknowledging the problem and committing to the strategy. Over a period of months, one working-group session after another honed the plan. The “call-in” was arranged, set for precisely one hour, the speakers carefully chosen and rehearsed. A mother, a pastor, a prosecutor, an ex-offender, and so on. I couldn’t be there for the evening of the first call-in, on military duty half a world away. All I could do was watch the numbers, as a violent spring of 2014 gave way to a period of relative peace after the event.

  It worked. At least, it seems to have worked. Like economic development, our understanding of violence prevention remains primitive, partly because so many overlapping causes are at play. It almost resembles the state of medicine in the nineteenth century: finally advanced enough to do more good than harm, but only barely and not always. Still, I believe that it has made a difference. Shootings began to rise again in 2016 and 2017, but data from the program suggested it might have been higher otherwise. And the whole thing would have been worth it just to get the relationships built among the working group that still meets quarterly to oversee the strategy’s implementation. At countless tense moments for the community, we’ve been well served by having that team—a federal prosecutor, a minority pastor, a young analyst, an ex-offender specializing in street outreach, and a dozen others—accustomed to working together, with each other’s cell phone numbers when we need them.

  We had hit on a policy that I believed in. But finding an approach as a policymaker did not relieve me of my duties as a symbol. What I saw, beginning on that sad summer morning, is that policy and symbolism cannot be decoupled. As a manager, a mayor must focus on what can be measured and proven, difficult decisions, and the use of new and old tools to solve important problems. But as a leader, sometimes the most important thing is simply to show up, or to gather the right people together, to send a certain kind of message. And while the mayor is the chief executive for the city as an administration, it is no less important to be, as the legendary Indianapolis mayor Bill Hudnut once said, “the celebrator, and sometimes the mourner, to the city as community.”

  PERHAPS THE DEPTH OF SORROW we sometimes feel as mourners is what makes us best appreciate the value of celebration. When you inhale the spirit of a city on both its best and worst days, you find yourself swelling up with joy at events that a younger self might have found banal—the first pitch of a baseball game, the turn of a ceremonial shovel at a groundbreaking, the handing out of an award plaque. Introvert that I am, I even came to love a good parade.

  In a way, a parade more than anything symbolizes this mode of mayorcraft. My parade style is to begin alongside the “City of South Bend” entry, with as many city employees and interns as we can muster carrying a banner and passing out candy, but then I inevitably fall behind them as I go along the curb to shake as many hands as possible—and then sprint to catch up to my group before doing the whole thing again. I will meet hundreds of people but have no actual conversations. The younger me would have dreaded the idea of so many interactions without substance. As I trot by and stick out my hand, I have little to say beyond, “Good morning!” or “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” or “Nice work finding this spot to sit in the shade!”

  Even though it is superficial and brief, there is meaning to each encounter. The purpose of the contact is not to persuade, problem-solve, or convey information. That can wait for a Mayor’s Night Out, a State of the City speech, a council meeting, or an exchange of letters. This is about being present, on behalf of the city, not as an individual who may have something in particular to offer, but as a mayor whose role is to embody the community.

  CEREMONIES AND SYMBOLS ALSO SERVE to express the values of a community, and perhaps this is why I should not have been so surprised by the degree of controversy aroused by the naming of things. The renaming of a post office is sometimes used as a stock example of how Congress wastes its time when it could be doing something more important. But I learned through experience that the renaming of a street could be as significant as any piece of legislation.

  For as long as I could remember—but in reality, only since 2005—our city had a street on the West Side named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This drive bearing his name extended less than a mile, and some residents pointed out that not one building actually had MLK Drive as its address. From time to time, someone would come to the open-mic portion of a council meeting and argue that the naming ought to be extended to a longer stretch of the road, or applied to a different and more prominent street. It made sense to me; especially compelling was the idea of making sure it was a street with a bus route, given the significance of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, so that a bus could be seen in South Bend with Dr. King’s name over its windshield.

  It turns out that one of the few unilateral, unchecked powers that an Indiana mayor has is to rename a street through a city Board of Public Works, so it seemed like I could just uncap my blue pen and take care of the issue. But I also knew to make sure that the choice had some community support, so I worked with our council to set up a volunteer committee of respected local residents to gather feedback and make suggestions. Then came the opposition, surprisingly fierce on the part of some. A remarkable number of reasons were presented to the committee why it couldn’t be this street, or that street. Some complained about the loss of history if an old name was removed to make room for MLK. Others spoke of the cost to businesses of changing their addresses. Some warned of a loss in land values.

  Of course, racial tension lurked near the surface of almost all these conversations. But it was always offstage, something you could feel but not point out, shading the discussion through vague allusions to “desirability” or “history.” Looking for guidance and precedent, I learned that thousands of pages have been written on the topic, ranging from books with titles as straightforward as Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street to academic articles as esoteric as “Street Naming and the Politics of Belonging: Spatial Injustices in the Toponymic Commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

  Every idea I floated for such “toponymic commemoration” met a new angle of resistance. Lincoln Way West drew opposition because it was a historic highway. Extending the existing route along Chapin Street was opposed out of regard for the historic neighborhood and the city father, Horatio Chapin, for whom it was named. (The Tribune recounted a 1995 debate on the same topic: “One lady said, ‘Martin Luther King Jr. is dead.’ And we said, ‘Well, we’re pretty sure Mr. Chapin is dead, too.’ ”) People living in that area hired a lawyer who went so far as to say that it would be illegal for me to rename the street there on the advice of the committee, because the city clerk had forgotten to advertise a couple of the committee meetings as required. A lady from that area came to a Mayor’s Night Out event and suggested, fire in her eyes, that North Shore Drive, where I lived, should be considered. I was about to tell her that that was fine by me, though I didn’t think the community activists would find it prominent enough; but by the time I had the sentence formed in my head, I was looking at her backside as she stomped off, apparently satisfied that she had proven her point with an outrageous suggestion.

  There turned out to be a natural alternative: Saint Joseph Street. There were enough places already named after our area’s patron saint of nearly everything (a church, a hospital,
a middle school, a high school, the river, and the county, to take a few) that I didn’t think he would mind. And with a major downtown streets initiative wrapping up, it would be one of the finest streetscapes in the city. It was prominent—right in the middle of downtown—and had major addresses on it, including the Century Center and the School Corporation. The committee members seemed to like it, though they had made the more modest recommendation of extending the existing road. I announced it, arranged for the street signs to be made, and made it official on Dr. King’s birthday in 2017.

  Achieving this took us four years (or over twenty, depending how you start the clock). And now, along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, there has been no cause for regret. The street looks good, and so do the buses bearing Dr. King’s name that run along it. Land values are only rising there, and I’ve heard nothing about any impact on whether the area is “desirable.” Instead, it is a statement of our city’s belief in racial and social justice and a measure of pride in the diversity of our past and present. It stands among the other ways my administration has found to honor Dr. King, like adding it to the calendar of city holidays, and unveiling a statue of the moment in which he stood arm in arm with Notre Dame’s president, Father Ted Hesburgh, in Chicago in 1964, all part of a symbolic texture revealing what is important to our city. Alongside more direct expressions of the lessons of civil rights—like the lectures and exhibits at our Civil Rights Heritage Center, built under my predecessor from the remains of a once-segregated natatorium—it signals to us the value that a city can place on the struggle for justice. And it forces us to acknowledge that the struggle is still under way.