There has been undeniable progress in the relationship between the Tulsa police and the city’s black community in the past 100 years. Then again, it is hard to imagine it could have gotten worse.
Complaints about police bias and a lack of enough minority officers remain.
Yet the police chief is now a black man from north Tulsa, the area that includes what was once the US’ wealthiest black business district.
Photo: AFP
Back in 1921 — decades before the civil rights movement — even the thought of a black police chief would have been inconceivable. On May 31 and June 1 that year, Greenwood — the black north Tulsa neighborhood that includes the area known as Black Wall Street — was burned to the ground with assistance from the virtually all-white Tulsa Police Department.
Sparked by accusations that a 19-year-old black man had assaulted a 17-year-old white girl in an elevator, the Tulsa Race Massacre left as many as 300 black people dead and thousands of black residents displaced. Thirty-five square blocks were torched and damages spiraled into the millions.
Tulsa’s police department deputized white mobs and provided them with arms. Numerous reports describe white men with badges setting fires and shooting black people as part of the Greenwood invasion.
An Associated Press article from the time said that black people who were driven from their homes by the hundreds shouted “Don’t shoot” as they rushed through the flames.
After the massacre went largely ignored for decades, awareness has increased in the past few years. In 2013, then-Tulsa police chief Chuck Jordan stood in Greenwood and apologized for the department’s role.
The appointment of Wendell Franklin to succeed Jordan last year is seen by some as a measure of progress, but black Tulsans say that is not enough.
“I think it’s something that the community needs to see, but how far does that change really go when the doors are closed?” asked Ina Sharon Mitchell, a 70-year-old woman who was raised in north Tulsa.
In a 2018 Gallup-Tulsa Citivoice Index poll designed to measure quality of life issues, only 18 percent of black residents said they trusted police “a lot,” compared with 49 percent of white residents.
Forty-six percent of black Tulsans said they trusted the Police Department “not at all” or “not much,” compared with 16 percent of whites.
According to Tulsa Equality Indicators, produced in a partnership between the city and the Community Service Council, black juveniles were more than three times more likely to be arrested last year than white youths, while back adults were more than 2.54 times more likely to be arrested than white adults and 2.65 times more likely to experience use of force.
In 2016, then-Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby shot and killed Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man. Shelby — a white woman — was acquitted of manslaughter. She was reassigned in the department before resigning.
For black Tulsans who grew up learning what happened in Greenwood, Crutcher’s killing brought old pain back to the surface.
“I believe that my brother’s killing really unearthed a century of racial tension here in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” said Tiffany Crutcher, Terence Crutcher’s twin sister who is organizing commemoration events for the anniversary of the massacre.
Crutcher said the relationship between Tulsa’s police and the community is still strained.
“Here in Tulsa, explicitly and specifically, there’s not a really good relationship between law enforcement and the black community, black and brown communities,” she said. “The relationship isn’t good at all. There’s no trust there.”
Crutcher started the Terence Crutcher Foundation with a goal to bridge the fear and mistrust between black communities and law enforcement. She is frustrated with the lack of progress in Tulsa and is especially disappointed in Franklin.
“This is someone who doesn’t believe — someone who looks like me — that the Tulsa Police Department has a problem with racially biased policing,” she said. “He says the problem doesn’t exist.”
Franklin did not respond to several interview requests.
During his tenure, he has said police need better training in dealing with the public.
However, he also testified before an Oklahoma legislative panel after last year’s nationwide protests over racial bias in policing that recruiting new officers is difficult because of growing anti-law enforcement public sentiment.
Greg Robinson, the 31-year-old founding organizer of Demanding a JUSTulsa and director of Family and Community Ownership at Met Cares Foundation, said there is a lack of transparency from the Tulsa Police Department.
“I think the main problem is there is not a system of citizen oversight or accountability,” he said. “I think that’s really where we’re falling down. It’s not that all police are bad, because they’re not, but everybody in our community isn’t a criminal, either, and sometimes, it feels like we get policed like that.”
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