Sheeba Atiqi is on a goodwill tour, and while it may seem easy, it’s not at all. As a civilian ambassador for the Tulsa Police Department, her goal is to thaw relationships with an often distant community.
“People are afraid to approach them, they are afraid to ask them questions,” Atiqi said. “My job as a police ambassador is basically to serve as a liaison between the department and members of the community.”
This can be difficult, Atiqi says, because people may be “afraid, because of their own background, to engage with officers.”
Tulsa is proud of its history as a center of the oil industry, but the city also grapples with ghosts — particularly in the wake of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when local police aided a rampaging white mob , which led to dozens, if not more, being killed. killed and a black neighborhood of nearly forty blocks incinerated. The mistrust faced by the Tulsa Police Department therefore 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 occurred in 2016 with the police shooting of a motorist. Terrence Crutcher. He was confused and had PCP in his system, but he was unarmed. The white police officer who shot him was later acquitted of manslaughter.
“Terrence’s death truly exposed a century of racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” said Tiffany Crutcher, Terrence’s twin sister.
When asked if she held the police responsible, Tiffany responded, “What does responsibility look like when you kill an unarmed man with his hands in the air?” »
Tulsa has more police shootings per arrest than 93 percent of the nation’s major police departments, CBS News found using data from Mapping Police Violence. The city’s own data shows below-average scores on accountability – resolving citizen complaints. Tulsa’s own equality review gave itself failing grades on juvenile and adult arrests by race.
“If we’ve done something wrong, we’ll own it. We’ll say, ‘How can we fix it and how can we make sure it doesn’t happen again?'” Larson said.
Tulsa police did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the police data. Tiffany Crutcher says the data speaks for itself.
“What you’re saying is contrary to the data. I didn’t invent the data, it’s your data,” Crutcher said.
When asked if the department was making progress in building trust, Crutcher said, “It means feeling uncomfortable, and I don’t believe the Tulsa Police Department is doing that.” has done it again.”
Meanwhile, Larson implores critics who view the changes as performative to “judge us on our actions going forward.”
“We need to adopt a mindset that helps ourselves,” Atiqi said.
Marc Strassmann
