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2011–2026
The longest controversy in the city's modern record began with a telephone line. Line 6031 in the South Bend Police Department had been set to record in 2005, at the request of the officer then assigned to it, who had been receiving threatening calls. When that officer moved to another building in 2010, the line passed to Captain Brian Young — and it went on recording, though Young did not know it. These facts come from the court's own findings, entered in 2026 at the end of the case; what the recordings contained has never been made public, and the fight over them outlasted two mayors' terms.
In February 2011 the department's communications director, Karen DePaepe, was restoring the crashed Voice Logger recording system when she found Young's voice on the line and realized officers' internal calls had been captured for months. She informed Chief Darryl Boykins in early March 2011. By the 2026 court's findings, the chief allowed the recording to continue and told neither Young nor Internal Affairs. Through 2011 the line captured conversations involving other officers, and in December 2011 Boykins directed DePaepe to copy the calls he considered most troubling onto cassettes — five tapes, drawn from calls on eight dates in 2011.
What was on the tapes was described in public only by DePaepe, and her description was an allegation, never a finding. In her court filings she said she had heard discriminatory racial comments by high-ranking officers and conduct she believed possibly illegal. The recorded officers — Young, Tim Corbett, Steve Richmond, and David Wells — denied the allegations throughout, and no investigator ever sustained them: the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office reviewed the matter and brought no charges against anyone. In a joint statement signed November 12, 2013, settling his own claims, Boykins joined the city in stating that neither party was aware of evidence that any of the recorded officers had done anything illegal or used a racist word against him. Both poles of that contradiction — the whistleblower's sworn description and the chief's signed statement — stand in the record, unreconciled.
The personnel fight came first. In March 2012 Mayor Pete Buttigieg announced that Boykins, the city's first Black police chief, would resign. Boykins rescinded the resignation; the mayor demoted him to captain, citing a loss of confidence, and some 300 residents marched in protest through the city. In April 2012 DePaepe was fired. The Common Council, which had moved to subpoena the tapes — Councilman Oliver Davis first proposed the subpoena — demanded them under the state's public-records law, arguing the recordings were public records. The mayor's office refused, and in a step without real precedent in the city's history, the city sued its own council in federal court.
The litigation then ran on two tracks for fourteen years. In City of South Bend v. South Bend Common Council (N.D. Ind. No. 3:12-CV-475), the city asked the federal court to declare that disclosure would violate the Federal Wiretap Act. After a bench trial the district court ruled for the city, but on August 1, 2017, the Seventh Circuit vacated the judgment (865 F.3d 889) on jurisdictional grounds and left the disclosure question to the state courts. The private claims settled in December 2013 for $575,000 in all — $500,000 to the four recorded officers and Young's wife, and $50,000 to Boykins plus $25,000 toward his attorney's fees, on the joint statement quoted above. DePaepe settled her own case in February 2014, reported by the press of record at $235,000 — one later account gave $275,000 — and agreed not to discuss the tapes' contents. In state court the council won a ruling for disclosure in 2020, but appeals kept the contents sealed, and the underlying wiretap question went to a two-day bench trial on December 9–10, 2025.
The case ended — if it has ended — on May 28, 2026, when Judge Jamie C. Woods of the St. Joseph Superior Court ruled that the recordings violated both the Indiana Wiretap Act and the Federal Wiretap Act. The court found that the department had continuous knowledge the line was recorded — the chief reviewed the list of recorded lines annually — that under an earlier chief's practice, recording had attached to individually assigned lines by consent, and that the officers held a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calls. The court ordered the tapes destroyed and barred the city, the council, and any successor administration from disclosing, using, or even referring to the recordings in any proceeding; destruction was stayed while an appeal remained possible. Council President Canneth Lee set an executive session for June 3, 2026, to weigh the council's next steps, and Davis, who had started the fight in 2012, publicly called for an appeal. As of this record the appeal question remained open. By 2026 reporting the litigation had cost city taxpayers more than $3 million. The tapes themselves have never been released, and no court, prosecutor, or investigator has ever found a crime on them; the city's longest controversy closes on the contradiction it began with.
Sources:
- City of South Bend v. South Bend Common Council, 865 F.3d 889 (7th Cir. 2017); No. 3:12-CV-475 (N.D. Ind.)
- St. Joseph Superior Court, order of May 28, 2026 (Woods, J.) — findings on line 6031, the 2005 recording request, and the annual review of recorded lines
- New York Times, coverage of the demotion, the protest march, and the settlements (2012–2014)
- South Bend Tribune, coverage of the 2013 settlements, the 2020 disclosure ruling, and the 2025–2026 bench trial and ruling
- WSBT and WFYI, settlement reporting, December 2013 and February 2014