Pete Buttigieg explains why he demoted South Bend's first black police chief and what he learned

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is performing enviably in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary polls and he's getting glowing press, but his record isn't spotless. And at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire on Monday night, he got a question about an incident from 2012 involving his demotion of South Bend's first black police chief. CNN's Anderson Cooper set up the question by noting that the former police chief, Darryl Boykins, had allegedly ordered people to secretly record racist comments by senior white police officers.

A student asked Buttigieg what was on Boykins' tapes. "The answer is I don't know," Buttigeig said, explaining that the way the tapes were recorded potentially violated the federal wire tap act. "That's a law punishable by a term in prison and so I'm not going to violate it, even though I want to know what's on those tapes like everybody else does," he said. Buttigieg said he demoted Boykins after learning he "was the subject of a criminal investigation, not from him but the FBI, and it made it very hard to me to trust him as one of my own appointees."

Buttigieg conceded that he didn't handle the situation perfectly and said he learned a lot about the need to seek input from various communities and improving relations between communities of color and police.

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Buttigieg also mused about whether coming out as gay earlier would have derailed his public-service career, pointed out that "God doesn't have a political party," argued that it's a good thing not to "drown people in minutia before we've vindicated the values that animate our policies," and said that while Trump has "made it pretty clear he deserves impeachment," that's up to "the House and Senate to figure out" and he thinks the most decisive way to "relegate Trumpism to the dustbin of history" is to hand Trump "an absolute thumping at the ballot box."