As he runs for president, Pete Buttigieg has tried to contain the public fallout from the fatal police shooting this summer of a 54-year-old black father in South Bend, Indiana. Instead his closed-door efforts have only exacerbated his problems with black activists.
Members of Black Lives Matter, who met privately with Buttigieg in the weeks after the shooting, say the 37-year-old Democratic mayor brushed off their concerns about police violence in the city he has led since 2012.
"He seemed to have already taken a side. It did seem that he was prioritizing who he thought was important, and it didn't seem to be black people," said Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter who participated in a July call between the mayor and activists.
"I remember he felt very rushed, as if he wanted to check it off a box as something that he did," said Abdullah, who is a professor at California State University in Los Angeles.
That July phone call, and a meeting in his South Bend office the following month, marked the first-ever discussions between Buttigieg and Black Lives Matter, an influential racial justice activist group. By the end of August, the local chapter of the group called for Buttigieg to step down as mayor.
