Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and 2020 presidential candidate, pauses during the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, U.S., on Saturday, March 9, 2019. Callaghan O'Hare | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg in 2015 addressed two local police controversies in South Bend, Indiana, by saying in an official speech that "all lives matter," a comment that could land him in hot water with his party's increasingly energized progressive base. It could also bring new attention to his record on race as the city's mayor. Activists say that the phrase "all lives matter" misses the point of the Black Lives Matter movement or dismisses it. Buttigieg was apparently referencing his administration's refusal to hand over tape recordings of South Bend police officers that remain the subject of legal dispute, as well as the city council's request that a local police officer stop selling t-shirts that seemed to make light of the 2014 police killing of unarmed black man Eric Garner in New York.

"There is no contradiction between respecting the risks that police officers take every day in order to protect this community, and recognizing the need to overcome the biases implicit in a justice system that treats people from different backgrounds differently, even when they are accused of the same offenses," Buttigieg said at the time. "We need to take both those things seriously, for the simple and profound reason that all lives matter," he said. The comments came during Buttigieg's "State of the City" address at a local high school in March of that year. Buttigieg, a 37-year-old, openly gay veteran, has taken the Democratic field by storm since he launched his candidacy in late January. The liberal mayor is credited with the economic turnaround of a Midwestern city in a state that went to Trump by nearly 20 points in 2016, and where Vice President Mike Pence served as governor. But as voters begin to make sense of where Buttigieg stands on national issues, some progressives have begun to raise concerns about his ties to the controversial global consulting outfit McKinsey & Company and what some describe as a focus, at times colored by his gender, on his perceived intelligence, rather than his beliefs and proposals. "The Mayor's comment was in the context of discussing racial reconciliation in his 2015 State of the City speech," said Lis Smith, a spokesperson for Buttigieg, in a statement. "He believes black lives matter and that has been reflected in his actions as mayor of South Bend."

Buttigieg, police and race