Sheeba Atiqi’s is on a goodwill tour, and while it may look easy, it’s anything but. As a citizen ambassador for the Tulsa Police Department, her goal is to thaw relationships with an often distant community.
“People are afraid to approach them, afraid to ask them questions,” Atiqi said. “My job as a police ambassador is essentially the liaison between the department and community members.”
It can be a challenge, Atiqi says, because people “may be afraid to interact with officers because of their own background.”
Tulsa is proud of its history as a center of the oil industry, but the city also struggles with ghosts — especially the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when local police assisted a frenzied white crowd, leading to dozens, if not more, massacres. killed and a black neighborhood of almost forty square blocks was burned. So the mistrust facing the Tulsa Police Department 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 are doing a really good job of learning.”
Larson says building trust is important for every police department in the United States, and agrees it only takes one bad moment to destroy that trust.
There was such a moment in Tulsa in 2016 when police shot a motorist Terrence Crutcher. He was in trouble 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 has exposed 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 arrest than 93% of the nation’s major police departments, CBS News found using data from Mapping Police Violence. The city’s own data shows that scores are lower than average when it comes to accountability – resolving citizen complaints. Tulsa’s own equity assessment gave itself failing grades for juvenile and adult arrests by race.
“If we did something wrong, we’re going to own it. We’re going to say, ‘How do we fix it and how do we make sure it never happens again?'” Larson said.
The Tulsa Police Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the police data. Tiffany Crutcher says the data speaks for itself.
“What you’re saying contradicts the data. I didn’t make up the data; it’s your data,” Crutcher said.
When asked if the department is making progress in building trust, Crutcher said, “It means you feel uncomfortable, and I don’t believe the Tulsa Police Department has done that yet.”
Meanwhile, Larson implores critics who see the changes as performative to judge us based on our actions in the future.
“We have to get into the mindset of helping ourselves,” Atiqi said.
Mark Strassmann
