After a few weeks alongside national and global law enforcement leaders in Washington, D.C., a Tulsa police captain has returned home with a strengthened resolve not to compromise on the department’s recruiting or training standards.
Representatives from mid-major cities across the country attended the Metropolitan Police Department’s inaugural DC Police Leadership Academy, which also attracted a few from English, Dutch, German and Canadian agencies, creating a diverse, collaborative space and a swarm of networking opportunities.
“We talked about problems that we’re all facing, like recruitment and retention,” Capt. Mark Ohnesorge told the Tulsa World. “A lot of large agencies, including a lot of agencies (at the academy), have lowered their standards for entry into their police agencies. We were one of the few there that has not.”
Ohnesorge, the department’s incident management team commander and assistant training director for recruiting and hiring, attended a two-week session earlier this year. He returned for a third week in late March to graduate with the class of 70 as cherry blossoms colored the nation’s capital.
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The academy focused teaching sessions on critical thinking, growth mindset and motivational leadership, Ohnesorge said, but also offered opportunities to delve into a range of topics, including officer wellness, reorganizing and ordering departments to offset staffing issues, and coordinating response to large-scale situations such as active shooters.
Ensuring officers’ wellness was key, Ohnesorge said, and he brought back some ideas to try out.
“I think we’re doing a lot here in Tulsa to prioritize wellness for our police officers, but I think there are always things that we can do better,” he said, noting many priorities are at play. “How can we get the most out of our staffing, run (the department) more efficiently, but also keep our employees happy? The people who actually go out and make the 911 runs; how do you keep them happy?“
Such can be especially challenging in the aftermath of tragedy. Throughout the academy, experts walked the cohort through case studies of several active shooter situations that took place across the country, including those in 2017 in Las Vegas and in 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, from an incident and personnel management perspective.
The latter study illustrated just how important the local Police Department’s next actions and the city’s support were to first-responders, Ohnesorge said.
“Of course, anything tragic like that, it’s a community event, and the police are part of the community,” Ohnesorge said. “We saw that here when (Sgt.) Craig (Johnson) was shot and killed. We saw that the community rallied around the Police Department. So, just kind of remembering that our police officers are humans and families and they go home and think about these things just like any other person would.”
Not many coastal representatives had heard about Tulsa’s mass shooting on the Saint Francis Health System campus last June, but those from the Midwest who had offered their kudos on TPD’s response, Ohnesorge said.
In fact, Tulsa in general seemed to have a fair reputation among attendees. Ohnesorge said he was approached by several who mentioned that they had visited the city for one reason or another, including some as recently as December for the National Public Safety Partnership Summit, the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s national violent crime reduction conference.
“I actually texted the chief I think the first week because I had three or four people approach me and say, ‘Hey, I was just there for the PSP conference,’” Ohnesorge said. “They had a lot of good things to say about our city and our department, so that was nice.”
As for training and recruiting police officers, Ohnesorge said what was taught and what he heard from other agencies was “validating.”
“We’re doing what we can right now to attract the right candidates to be police officers, and what we’re doing in terms of training is headed the right direction,” Ohnesorge said. “Of course, it’s always better to have more training, but the fact that we have a 31-week academy, then four months of field training, then 40 hours of in-service this year, that kind of stuff, I think, is imperative for continuing to develop a modern police officer.”
That’s in addition to the bachelor’s degree that each applicant must have before consideration in the Tulsa Police Academy.
Ohnesorge said that, in terms of on-boarding and training, TPD was either comparable or required more than most other agencies he spoke with.
“The only ones that had more training than we did were the foreign agencies,” Ohnesorge said. “And they just have kind of a different police culture than we do.”
As for TPD’s recruitment outlook, Ohnesorge said it continues to trend in the right direction, though the surge in applications brought on by advertisement of a $15,000 hiring bonus seems to have leveled off.
TPD’s January academy class size of only 11 certainly “hurt,” Ohnesorge said, but for the May academy, the department was able to gather an encouraging 22 qualified applicants.
“That’s 22 people that we felt were of the caliber that we were looking for, because we’re not in the business of putting anyone out on the streets of Tulsa with a badge and a gun,” Ohnesorge said. “That’s the first thing we look for when we get someone in here: Can we see if we trust handing them a gun and telling them to go out and protect the city?”
Despite the staffing challenges, the Tulsa Police Department is unwilling to compromise on quality candidates for quantity, Ohnesorge said, but it’s not seeking any one background. Recruiters are casting a wide net over a variety of career fields but walking a narrow road when it comes to the pursuit of character.
“We don’t really care if they don’t have a lot of skill sets that are specific to this area, because we can train that into them,” Ohnesorge said of potential applicants. “If they are teachable, and if they have that high character, high integrity, then that’s all we need. We can do the rest here.”
Anyone interested in applying may visit the department’s informational recruiting website, jointpd.com.
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Tulsa World Public Safety Reporter Kelsy Schlotthauer talks with Editor Jason Collington about why the Tulsa Police Department has a national reputation when it comes to solving homicides. Schlotthauer wrote a story about the Homicide Unit’s strategy and some of the trends that appeared in the city’s 69 homicides last year. She also talks about what it takes to work a job with so much mayhem.
