TULSA, ranked top 10% of US cities!

[cynical]

It might be much simpler than trying to reinvent Tulsa morality.  It would require resources, though.

When I was in New York in the mid-1970s, there was a climate of fear on the streets.  The crime rate was spiraling out of control and no one seemed to have a solution for it.  Rudy Giuliani was elected on a platform of getting tough on crime, and I have to grudgingly admit that it did happen on his watch. 

His police commissioner, William Bratton, revamped the approach to interdicting criminals.  The conventional wisdom of the time was that when resources are scarce, you use those resources on major cases, not wasting them on petty crime.  Bratton's thinking was that there were two problems with this approach.  First, petty crime leads to more serious crime, second, petty crime was defining the what New Yorkers were experiencing on the streets. 

So they implemented George Kelling's "Broken Windows" theory, establishing a zero tolerance policy on petty crime.  That swept a good many young New Yorkers into the system. The police used advanced data collection, processing, and retrieval techniques to increase efficiency (the CompStat system).  Civil liberties proponents groused about the increasingly intrusive role of law enforcement in daily life, but the results were spectacular.  I went back on a business trip in the late 1990s and was amazed at how much more relaxed everyone was in midtown Manhattan.  There was still the bustle and hurry, but the fear was gone. 

More recently, Lowell, Mass., implemented the "broken windows" approach as a participant in a study by Harvard and Suffolk University researchers.  A brief article about Lowell's experience is in the Boston Globe.  http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/02/08/breakthrough_on_broken_windows/.  The article says the study suggests that changing the environment by cleaning up and eliminating code violations helped more than either the crackdown on misdemeanants or increased social services.

There's plenty of controversy about this.  "Broken Windows" is a much more concrete set of policies than the "community policing" policy that Drew Diamond implemented and is still followed by Ron Palmer.  http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/ResourceDetail.aspx?RID=513  I don't believe that they are contradictory. 

[Conan71]

The question would be then,,, Why is there such a high degree of "degredation of man" and "apathy in the family" in Tulsa compared to so many other places?   


Homicides as of Nov

Tulsa,  62      pop   385,000 
Seattle, 14     pop   595,000
Austin,  21     pop   745,000
Portland, 16    pop   575,000
Omaha, 25     pop   435,000
Minneapolis, 19,      375,000   

And most Canadian cities and a lot of European ones with populations in the millions barely break double digits.

One of my friends works narcotics at TPD, my understanding is that there is a lot of drug crap going down that is behind the high number of homicides.  No idea why our drug activity would be any worse than another city listed.  We are an odd anomaly.  Maybe I'm entirely wrong what I'm saying about the degradation of families and apathy toward participation in the successful outcome of their kids and the TPD needs to quit quibbling about driving cars home outside the city and to second jobs and work harder at having a neighborhood presence.  I dunno man, and our usual law enforcement members have not added their expert opinion or facts to help.  I do have to say I'm pretty irritated that the image coming out of TPD these days is that they are more worried about the benefit of driving a car home while our homicide rate soars.  This comes amongst more and more anecdotes about a total apathy on the part of the TPD toward property crimes.

Generally, our high rate of solved murder cases means that our acts of violence typically are not random, anonymous, or thrill kills.  Where's the answer- better community policing in the homicide hot spots? Get churches prostheletizing throughout the neighborhoods? Neighborhood watches (that's worked in other crime-riddled areas of the US)? Better education? Perhaps we need to take a look at how Rudy cleaned up New York and take some cues because whatever is going on in Tulsa isn't working if it's something the community as a whole can accomplish.  We simply need to decide what are our priorities, shiny new headquarters for our city offices, baseball stadiums, arenas, river projects or do we want to channel resources and money toward crime prevention.  I'm sure I've touched on bits of all the causes of the higher homicide rates, take your pick and figure out which is the most effective way to do with it.

Personally, it's pretty obvious to see there's a total disregard for the sanctity of other's lives and property going on here.  How you change that or prevent that mind-set from turning into homicide, your guess appears to be as good as mine.  I'm open to suggestions if people disagree with my opinions, always.

[SXSW]

Tulsa has a particularly bad gang problem that in turn has created a lot of black-on-black crime in the form of robbery and murder mainly on the north side (where the gang members live).  I would bet 90+% of the 62 homicides in Tulsa so far this year have been north of I-244 with the others either in the 61st & Peoria area or northeast Tulsa in the 21st & Garnett area.  That's my guess without looking at the data.  Targeting these gangs and the drug trade that causes the gang violence should be a top priority for TPD.  I don't know what else the police or the public can really do.  Austin, Portland, Omaha, etc. don't have the same poverty-striken ghetto areas that Tulsa, and other cities like Little Rock, Kansas City, Birmingham, Fort Worth, Memphis, Louisville, etc. have which breeds gang violence.  If you look up the crime statistics for those cities I'm sure they are close to Tulsa's stats or worse.

[waterboy]

I see the crime as being less localized than you do SX. East side is bad, North side has a core of nastiness, but so does 61st & Peoria, BA and numerous little pockets like east of 48th and Yale.

The common denominator is two fold. Drug availability and low income subsidized apartment communities that concentrate different strata of demos adjacent. Those adjacent areas then become criminal playgrounds. I would bet you that if you find a high crime area it has these elements nearby.

People confuse homeless addiction populations like those found near QT at 15th & Denver or downtown with serious criminals. They are mere petty beggars....thieves of opportunity. When you go to these other more densely populated low income apartment areas, you find some sober, seriously deranged criminal elements. They live in a different moral world than you or I.

Edit: Whoops! there is no QT at 15th & Peoria.

[SXSW]

I see the crime as being less localized than you do SX. East side is bad, North side has a core of nastiness, but so does 61st & Peoria, BA and numerous little pockets like east of 48th and Yale.

The common denominator is two fold. Drug availability and low income subsidized apartment communities that concentrate different strata of demos adjacent. Those adjacent areas then become criminal playgrounds. I would bet you that if you find a high crime area it has these elements nearby.

People confuse homeless addiction populations like those found near QT at 15th & Peoria or downtown with serious criminals. They are mere petty beggars....thieves of opportunity. When you go to these other more densely populated low income apartment areas, you find some sober, seriously deranged criminal elements. They live in a different moral world than you or I.

But is Tulsa any different than any other city that has low income/Section 8 housing and resulting crime?  I doubt it, although Tulsa's gang violence is worse than in cities our size or even larger cities.  But that has a lot to do with our location in the South/Midwest where there are similar conditions in lots of the cities from Memphis to Kansas City to Cincinnati to Birmingham, etc.  When I lived in Denver the highest crime areas were around housing projects near downtown.  Maybe we need to reform/rebuild public housing or police these areas more to reduce the criminal element? 

[Conan71]

There's plenty of controversy about this.  "Broken Windows" is a much more concrete set of policies than the "community policing" policy that Drew Diamond implemented and is still followed by Ron Palmer.  http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/ResourceDetail.aspx?RID=513  I don't believe that they are contradictory. 

Oh, and Drew Diamond was the police chief who infamously declared that Tulsa did not have a gang problem.

[FOTD]

It's mostly always drugs or money....sometimes women/men disputes or jealousy....that leads to drama and murder in poor neighborhoods. How else can they make a living?

So...maybe job creation would curtail some of this.

Or, You could always take the drugs out of their domain through decrim but POTUS OBAMA sez not to count on that.

Besides Conan, what would your buddy in TPD have to do? Could he patrol specific neighborhoods or head up a "broken windows" program? Drew Diamond was outed for trying a different approach to the gang situation that did not make the force comfortable.

[waterboy]

But is Tulsa any different than any other city that has low income/Section 8 housing and resulting crime?  I doubt it, although Tulsa's gang violence is worse than in cities our size or even larger cities.  But that has a lot to do with our location in the South/Midwest where there are similar conditions in lots of the cities from Memphis to Kansas City to Cincinnati to Birmingham, etc.  When I lived in Denver the highest crime areas were around housing projects near downtown.  Maybe we need to reform/rebuild public housing or police these areas more to reduce the criminal element? 

I couldn't say anything about other cities. Someone can pull the stats I'm sure. But, I know Tulsa embraced urban renewal with zest and pursued subsidized housing to fill the pockets of local builders. Some of that development money put me through college. Entire neighborhoods were deemed too dangerous to exist thus these "concentration camp" apartment complexes were built alongside Riverside, 23rd, Apache, 61st etc. It was more than that though as it thoroughly disrupted black neighborhoods near downtown. Together with the redlining that was prevalent in that period it had the effect of creating poor zones, and minority zones amidst more affluent white suburban areas like Brookside. Not a good thing.

If you are implying that Southern red states are more prone to this crime growth than urban midwest and west coast cities, well, you may be right. Our gene pool in Oklahoma was decimated when the smarter folks left during the depression! LOL. And much of the South has been economically damaged since they are not exactly digital employment bases. They are largely tourism, music, art, farming, gambling and some low skilled manufacturing since their labor is pretty cheap. No one looks to Mississippi or Tennessee as centers of educational excellence though they have fine colleges, at least on a par with OU and OSU but lets face it, they ain't Stanford.

[FOTD]

I couldn't say anything about other cities. Someone can pull the stats I'm sure. But, I know Tulsa embraced urban renewal with zest and pursued subsidized housing to fill the pockets of local builders. Some of that development money put me through college. Entire neighborhoods were deemed too dangerous to exist thus these "concentration camp" apartment complexes were built alongside Riverside, 23rd, Apache, 61st etc. It was more than that though as it thoroughly disrupted black neighborhoods near downtown. Together with the redlining that was prevalent in that period it had the effect of creating poor zones, and minority zones amidst more affluent white suburban areas like Brookside. Not a good thing.

If you are implying that Southern red states are more prone to this crime growth than urban midwest and west coast cities, well, you may be right. Our gene pool in Oklahoma was decimated when the smarter folks left during the depression! LOL. And much of the South has been economically damaged since they are not exactly digital employment bases. They are largely tourism, music, art, farming, gambling and some low skilled manufacturing since their labor is pretty cheap. No one looks to Mississippi or Tennessee as centers of educational excellence though they have fine colleges, at least on a par with OU and OSU but lets face it, they ain't Stanford.

You have once again nailed it as far as creating poor zones and improper and immoral choices that got us here.

Let's do this. Let's set up rural farm zones and teach the poor how to farm and facilitate this with government assistance...trading out land for production...hope instead of desperation.

[waterboy]

40 acres and a mule? Not a bad idea. Trade the 9mm in for a shotgun and provide protected markets for the product. There is plenty of government land in the area and we are an ag state at heart so the framework for support is there. If the incentive were large enough, and the produce organic, I would become a farmer too.

Then we could re-develop those poor zones into better uses.

[FOTD]

Or turn those complexes into parks and urban farms....

But yes, you get the gist... only government agencies both Federal and State could combine to facilitate such revolutionary and necessary change. If indeed agriculture is our secondary State resource then it is being under utilized while we let more and more urban misery spread.

[TheArtist]

   Been interesting to read the responses.  We have had similar discussions before and over time my thoughts on the issue have evolved and become both broader and more specific.


  Some thoughts...

1.  Its interesting to note on that initial rankings list how Tulsa ranks as one of the highest crime cities in the US, where as waaaaay down at the bottom, Broken Arrow is one of the safest in the nation.  Many of our other suburbs also have some very low crime rates. So if we were to average in our immediate suburbs  (back to that, Tulsa county would still be smaller than OKC land wise) our "rates" percentage of crimes per person would be lower than they are, BUT we would still have a higher than average number of homicides etc. than even the county population should have compared to similar sized populations.  The stats would be better in many instances, but not where one would like.  (St Louis runs into a similar problem, but with an even smaller city core with a concentration of crime, surrounded by low crime suburbs (many of which would be within Tulsas city limits).)    

2.  When you concentrate "crime prone people" (don't know how else to say it) its like adding fuel to a fire.   Areas of high poverty (True, poverty itself doesn't equal crime, but being middle or upper middle class sure as heck decreases it)  which seem to be concentrated by; housing policies, general migration patterns (out of Tulsa, and or, to the suburbs) bad urban planning, urban renewal, etc.  Its interesting to see that Tulsas population is still decreasing, while the county population is increasing.  And again, it seems that when you concentrate "bad" it tends to beget "worse".  These areas become breeding grounds for "criminal employment",  career criminals (just one sometimes committing a hundred burglaries or more).  Not the whole problem or cause by a long shot, but doesn't help.  Each negative thing adding a couple more homicides or career criminals for instance, and your rising up the rankings quite fast.


4.  Broken windows.  I remember them talking in NYC about the idea that if you get em for every small infraction, jaywalking, littering, etc. and create a decent environment.  The "crime norm" becomes reset at a much lower threshold.  It starts to create a different psychological, and even physical, environment in many different ways.  Often works in schools, and even with the kids at home lol.  Perhaps a "Broken Windows" combined with a "troop surge" could have some positive effect.

3.  We try to "spend our way" into having less crime by putting more of our; thoughts, time, money, effort, etc. into punishing crimes and not much on preventing them.  Less passion on mental health and drug rehabilitation services etc... more on putting people away. Its up to society/government to punish, but its up to the individuals to "help others". I find it telling that when we talk of paying for all types of prevention measures,  they are often characterized as social welfare, but when we spend money on prisons for instance, its not? Is it not usually "The government spending money on; the poor, the drug addicted, or the uneducated, to non-workers, etc." ?  Spend our tax dollars on prevention and your giving away our hard earned money to those who don't deserve it. They only deserve our tax dollars when we are punishing them? My point isn't that people who commit crimes shouldn't be punished or put in prison, the point is that, we insist its the governments role to do that, but we seem hell bent against the notion that the government, our tax dollars, would then have just as much a role in prevention. If its the governments place to do one, why isn't it equally the governments place to do the other? the passion and balance seem skewed.  It might help if there were more of a balance, towards the preventative side.   Again, not the whole problem or cause.


5.  Culture.  I found this statement by FOTD very interesting....

"You may not be able to force morals on some one....but you can cultivate a sense of community from which a sense of belonging comes. Instead, what we see is a clearly divided scene of anarchy and disenfranchisement. Government can help alleviate this predicament over time through lifting up the under class."

  especially after having read this article....  

   "Homicide Rates Linked to Trust in Government, Sense of Belonging, Study Suggests"

an excerpt....

"You look at all the other theories, and they die a horrible death in the face of the evidence," he said.

That includes theories held dear by both conservatives and liberals. If you look at the evidence over time, poverty and unemployment don't lead to higher murder rates, as many liberals argue, he said. But locking up criminals, using the death penalty, and adding more police don't hold the murder rate down either, as conservatives claim.

At any one point in time, researchers may find an association between one of these causes and homicide rates in a particular area. But once you try to apply those theories more broadly, at different places and in different eras, the links disappear


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091201111204.htm



  and this....

 "Senior Lecturers, Dr Steve Hall and Dr Craig McLean, claim in the latest international journal Theoretical Criminology that homicide rates are significantly higher in nations in neo-liberal politics where free market forces are allowed free rein, such as the USA, but are significantly lower in nations governed by social-democratic policies which still characterise most Western European nations.

Historically, says Hall, homicide rates are at their lowest when social-democratic policies govern nations. The US homicide rate was halved in the decades following the Depression, when the social democratic policies of the New Deal replaced ailing free-market policies. The nation experienced an initial rise from the mid-60s, when the nation's brief social democratic project began to wind down, followed by sharp increases during the 'crime explosion' of the mid-80s and early 90s which followed Reagan's abrupt introduction of free-market policies. Rates were eventually brought down in the late 90s, but only by imprisoning large numbers of violent offenders....

Hall said: "Britain and the US have the worst violent crime rates of the industrialised west – far worse than Western continental Europe – because we have the most..., individualist culture and the least developed sense of solidarity and common fate."

  Then throw in the notion of the cultural differences you see down the Appalachian Trail. Look at those Red Blue counties that run down the area and into Oklahoma. There was a migration pattern of very "anti government" "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" "do it yourself" folk. That map and migration pattern also almost perfectly matches the drug use maps, poverty maps, etc.  

[rhymnrzn]

Not that I would stop everything to listen, but, starting 12/30 the BBC is going to air a program about Tulsa:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005jlyf

We delve into Tulsa's tough underworld in the company of two police officers who have developed dazzling talents as storytellers

So with all the problems in the nation, we don't need more case studies to figure out the causes for so many falling into decay.   The fact is Tulsa just happens to be the place where the rite of passage and lot of inheritance for all Americans (being the land of our birthright) has flowed in and out of, and thus, it is the ideal place to have a national pow wow, if there will be any healing and liberty.  Unto this day, however, they continue to  build up un-released debts, and bypass the feast weeks and sabbath years (for man, beast, and land), in exchange for fading flowers, never-ending labors, and useless processing.   

[buckeye]

There was a migration pattern of very "anti government" "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" "do it yourself" folk. That map and migration pattern also almost perfectly matches the drug use maps, poverty maps, etc.

Individualism isn't antithetical to a strong sense of community and I find that implication foreshadows very worrying conclusions.  Moreover, I have a hard time believing there's not some kind of causal/coincidental confusion going on here - both in your thought and the good doctors'.

Didn't the 80's 'crime wave' have more to do with drug operations than Reagan's policies?  I suppose the libertarian would argue that migrating currently illegal drugs into the free market would largely eliminate drug violence.  Sounds more like Messrs. Hall & McLean have a political axe to grind.

Speaking more generally about crime, education is key.  People must be shown the wider world and the possibilities of doing things a better way.  An entrenched criminal culture is very difficult to break and a gang culture "cultivate(s) a sense of community from which a sense of belonging comes".

[waterboy]

I also agree that the crime wave of the 80's/90's was only concommitant with the Reagan/Bush administration policies. Remember, much of what they actually championed and campaigned on never was reality. Debt ballooned, labor costs grew, and so did government. Hardly what was envisioned.

However, the attitude was what counted. It became obvious that success was what mattered most, no matter how it was obtained and the measure of success was consumption. Winning wasn't just winning, it was everything. With that in mind folks didn't much care how you got your wealth; fraud, drugs, etc as long as you had wealth and power. Look at the movies of the time for confirmation. "Wall Street", "Scarface", etc.

Education is too easy to use as the fault and the solution. And takes a long, controversial time period. Something needs to change that 80's/90's culture that permeated all demographic levels and culminated with Bernie Madoff and friends. It takes encouraging people to leave the poor zones for a different life, combined with education and a repurposing of those zones. It takes meaningful jobs that allow folks to actually afford decent housing as well.