The president of South Bend's FOP is making national headlines as he accuses Mayor Pete Buttigieg of playing politics with a police shooting.
The group is upset about the mayor's recent comments about police and racial problems.
FOP President Harvey Mills is also attacking GoFundMe for taking down a page supporting the officer, and his outrage has now helped push a new fund past the $70,000 mark.
We sat down with Mills on Wednesday to hear his side of the story.
He accuses the mayor of politicizing the shooting of Eric Logan and wants him to stop talking about it, saying Buttigieg threw their department into the middle of the presidential campaign for his own benefit.
The FOP has been very vocal over the past of couple of days -- and all of this is happening as the investigation into the police shooting fell into the hands of special prosecutor on Wednesday.
Mills says the Mayor is using the shooting for political gain while throwing the police department under the bus.
"We need him in our community or we need a mayor in our community to step up and help our police department rather than try and muzzle them,” said Mills.
The FOP mostly took issue with this statement Mayor Buttigieg made at the Democratic Primary debate:
"Until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism, whatever this incident teaches us, we will be left with the bigger problem of the fact there's a wall of mistrust put up, one racist act at a time.”
Mills says “he has basically called all police officers racist and that is blatantly untrue.”
On Monday, the FOP sent a letter to Buttigieg asking him to recuse himself from all decisions related to the investigation.
The organization said the Mayor's comments quote vilify police; Buttigieg responded, saying it's not anti-police to be pro-racial justice.
"You could argue that no one has a greater role to play when it comes to community trust in policing than the police themselves,” said Buttigieg.
The FOP has been making other headlines recently after starting a defense fund for Sgt. O'Neill on the popular fundraising site GoFundMe.
Their fundraiser was removed after the website says it violated its terms and conditions that don't allow campaigns for legal defense funds for crimes associated with hate, violence or race.
They've since started a new fund on a different website that has raised close to $70,000.
More...
