Nearly a year ago, the city of Tulsa released its 2018 Tulsa Equality Indicators report detailing, among other things, statistics showing black Tulsans were more frequently arrested and more likely to have police use force against them.
Since then, the city had not held a public hearing to discuss the report’s findings, which Mayor G.T. Bynum called “damning.” That changed Thursday night, but not on the city’s account.
Led by the efforts of District 1 City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper and attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, the north Tulsa community held its own hearing on the report’s findings at the 36th Street North Event Center in hopes of spurring ideas on policing reform.
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Organizers, including the North Side United Coalition of Clergy and the Terence Crutcher Foundation, hoped to have a discussion and commit it to record in hope that the city will use the conversation in its own hearing. Solomon-Simmons said the event was a direct response to the City Council’s having “refused” to hold hearings.
“We as a community, along with our national and city partners, have come together to put on a public hearing to get testimony and information that we can give to the City Council as further impetus to use their powers to fix this problem that’s been terrorizing Tulsa for decades,” Solomon-Simmons said.
The city’s score for Race and Officer Use of Force was 20 out of 100, according to the report. It found that blacks are five times more likely than Hispanics to have force used on them by officers and that whites are half as likely to experience use of force by police than blacks.
The event’s two panels discussed at length both the data behind the issues of discriminatory policing and the ways to fix those issues. Speakers also took public comments and passed around police incident forms for community members to voice their concerns and experiences with policing.
Roma Presley also spoke, issuing a statement and calling for greater accountability in the Tulsa Police Department after the death of her son, Joshua Wayne Harvey, who died after being tased by Tulsa police officers in August.
“My son was a 25-year-old unarmed black man who died at the hands of Tulsa police,” Presley said. “But he was so much more than a statistic. He was a son, a nephew and a father to a beautiful little boy. … We demand answers. We demand transparency. We demand accountability. We demand justice.
“The city of Tulsa, Mayor Bynum and the City Council need to know that we will not accept anything less.”
Jill Webb, legal director of the ACLU of Oklahoma, and Monique Dixon, deputy policy director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, moderated the hearings.
Webb, formerly of the Tulsa County Public Defender’s Office, said talking about the issues is vital because data show that many Tulsans have wildly different impressions of and interactions with police.
“So people on the south side probably haven’t been pulled over because they have a small crack in their windshield or the light on their license plate is a little dim or they’re wearing blue,” Webb said. “Those things will get you pulled over frequently on the north side or stopped and searched.
“One side has a tendency to be patrolled, and one side has the tendency to be contained, and they (black residents) can feel that.”
Multiple speakers took repeated issue with the city’s handling of the report’s findings, specifically former Tulsa Police Chief Drew Diamond. He said he’s had the same community policing conversation with every Tulsa mayor for the past 25 years. Despite the perceived perpetual inaction, Diamond said these problems are fixable from the top down and in a way that makes communities and officers safer.
The most pointed jab at the city, however, came from Solomon-Simmons during his panel with Diamond. The attorney referenced Bynum’s statements that racial inequality is “the great moral issue of our time in Tulsa.”
“Is this a moral issue? Is this the reason (Bynum) ran?” Solomon-Simmons asked. “Do black lives matter to Mayor Bynum? Do they matter to the City Council? When they vote, we’ll know the answer.”
