New city jail open for business
The new municipal jail opened last week, meaning that those arrested solely for misdemeanors will no longer have to spend time in David L. Moss Correctional Center, but rather will be housed in the same building as the municipal courts. Speaking at the opening ceremony for the city jail, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said that among the reasons for booking municipal inmates through the new facility was the much shorter time in processing those arrested afforded by not using the county jail.
“The fact that our police department was allowed to get 200 officers below where it should be was a serious concern for the council and I,” Bynum said, “so we recognized that we need to be smarter about how we use officers’ time.”
“The reality is that having an officer spend on average 90 minutes at the [county] jail waiting to book someone is not an efficient use of their time,” the mayor continued. “Having a facility that we control, we can dramatically reduce the amount of time that our police officers spend booking someone into the jail so they can then get back out and pursue violent criminals.”
Bynum said the vast majority of those booked into the city jail will be those accused of shoplifting, public intoxication, driving without a license, driving without insurance, and other “low level offenders.”
The mayor said there would be other time and cost saving factors under the new system, whereby detainees are housed in the same building as the municipal court and so will not require transportation from another facility.
“Historically low level offenders would be brought to the county jail, and then it would take on average about two days for them to be transported over here to our municipal court, so you could have someone who got arrested for shoplifting or driving without a license… spending two days in jail before they could get a court appearance,” Bynum explained. “That’s a cost that the taxpayers were burdened with that was simply due to inefficiency. Now, we’ll be able to take someone in an elevator down one floor to see a judge. It will be a matter of hours rather than a matter of days that the taxpayers will be paying to house someone like that.”
Tulsa Chief of Police Chuck Jordan agreed with the mayor that the new system has been long overdue.
“If you look around the country, most major cities do have their own jail, and there are good reasons for that,” Jordan said. “We will now be booking our prisoners the same way every other agency in Tulsa County does. We will take our municipal prisoners here and we’ll obviously take our felonies to the county jail.”
Jordan said that in addition to freeing up time for his officers, the new method would result in city detainees being released much faster as well.
“We think that’s important for our community,” the chief said.
Because the city has no 287(g) agreement such as the Tulsa Sheriff’s office with ICE, undocumented detainees taken into custody solely for minor traffic offenses or other municipal misdemeanors will not be at risk for being placed on immediate ICE holds as they have been in the past. However, the mayor explained to La Semana, Oklahoma state law requires that all inmates be fingerprinted and their prints forwarded to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI). If the OSBI or any other law enforcement agency then requests a hold be placed on an inmate, the city jail must comply.
When it comes to local law enforcement, the mayor said the community should feel safe in calling the Tulsa Police Department if they need help or witness a crime.
“We’re not out kicking people’s doors down and checking citizenship. We want folks to know they can call our Tulsa police officers and they’re going to be there to help them,” Bynum said.
Chief Jordan echoed the mayor’s sentiments, saying, “I hope the community sees we are not doing immigration enforcement.”
“We’re trying every week to hire more bilingual officers,” Jordan said.
The new city jail can house 27 males and five females.