As Tulsa police seek to build trust, critics want accountability

Sheeba Atiqi's is on a goodwill tour, and while it may look easy, it's anything but. As a civilian ambassador for the Tulsa Police Department, her goal is to thaw relations with an often standoffish community.

"People are afraid to approach them, afraid to ask them questions," Atiqi said. "My job as a police ambassador is basically to be the liaison between the department and the community members."

It can be challenging, Atiqi says, because people may be "afraid due to their own background to engage with officers."

Tulsa is proud of its history as the center of the oil industry, but the city also grapples with ghosts — especially the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when local police assisted a rampaging white mob, leading to dozens, if not more, being killed and a Black neighborhood of nearly forty square blocks being incinerated. So the distrust that Tulsa police face runs deep and spans generations.

"If you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it," said Chief Dennis Larson, a 45-year veteran of the department. "I think we're doing a really good job of learning."

Larson says building trust is important for every police department in the United States, and agrees that it only "takes one bad moment" to ruin that trust.

In Tulsa, one such moment came in 2016 with the police shooting of motorist Terrence Crutcher. He was troubled and had PCP in his system, but was unarmed. The white police officer who shot and killed him was later acquitted of manslaughter.

"Terrence's death truly unearthed a century of racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma," said Tiffany Crutcher, Terrence's twin sister.

When asked if she holds police accountable, Tiffany said, "What does accountability look like when you kill an unarmed man with his hands in the air?"

Tulsa has more police shootings per arrests than 93% of the nation's major police departments, CBS News found using data from Mapping Police Violence. The city's own data shows lower-than-average scores when it comes to accountability — resolution of citizen complaints. Tulsa's own equality review gave itself failing grades on juvenile and adult arrests by race.

"If we did something wrong, we're gonna own it. We're gonna say, 'How do we fix it and how do we make sure it never happens again?'" Larson said.

Tulsa police did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the police data. Tiffany Crutcher says the data speaks for itself.

"What you're saying is antithetical to the data. I didn't make up the data — it's your data," Crutcher said.

When asked if the department is making inroads with building trust, Crutcher said, "It means getting uncomfortable, and I don't believe Tulsa's police department has done that yet."

Meanwhile, Larson implores critics who see the changes as performative to "judge us by our actions in the future."

"We need to get into the mindset to help ourselves," Atiqi said.

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