“We’re everybody’s police department”

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Now in his 7th year as Tulsa’s Chief of Police, Chuck Jordan has seen a lot of change in his city since taking over the department. Populations have shifted, downtown looks very different from its former self, and even crime has changed. Cyber crime is now ubiquitous and opiates have replaced meth as the drug du jour.

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Some things, however, remain the same. Criminals still target the vulnerable, and, despite Jordan’s continued efforts to let them know he is on their side, many Hispanics still don’t trust the police. This results in underreported crimes, perpetrators going free, and Hispanics being disproportionately victimized in robberies and other violent crimes.

“We’re having quite a bit of crime committed on the Hispanic community, and a lot of that is because they’re keeping their money on their person,” Jordan told La Semana in an exclusive interview last week. “They’re not using banks, and people know they’ve got cash on them.”

“It’s a real unknown for us as far as what kind of victims we’ve got as far as domestic violence and other kinds of crime, and even some of the robbery crime we don’t know about,” the chief continued. “There’s still concern that we’re going to ask about immigration status, there’s still concern that we’re going to be like police in the country they came from. That’s something we’re always trying to overcome.”

For the record, as he has said often and in front of as many audiences as possible, it is the policy of the Tulsa Police Department never to ask the immigration status of a victim or witness to a crime. Even suspects will likely not have their status checked until they are booked into the Tulsa County Jail.

“We don’t want anybody to be a victim in this town without us being able to assist and help protect them like we do everybody else,” Jordan insisted.

Jordan explained that the issue of immigration reform has been ignored for years by the federal government, and now local police departments around the nation are being asked to clean up a mess they didn’t make.

“Chiefs across the country are taking the same stance I’m taking,” Jordan said, “and my stance is – as a police officer I’ve been screaming for three decades – please tighten up our borders, please get more people in the State Department so we can assure a reasonably fast path to citizenship. The government wouldn’t do it, so now we’ve had to assimilate all these people who don’t have legal immigration status into our community, and now we suddenly have a government that’s come in saying, ‘We want you to fix this.’”

“There are a lot of reasons why we won’t do immigration enforcement,” the chief explained. “That’s the biggest one, secondly, that’s a lot of training. And it would be an unfunded mandate – we don’t have the staffing to go out here and do that.”

Jordan said it’s a different matter for those who have committed crimes while here, pointing out that there’s no country where criminals are welcome, “but to go out [for] just immigration status alone, that ship’s sailed as far as us trying to resolve that.”

So far this year, Jordan said, homicides are about where they were at this time in 2016, not a comparison that bodes well considering last year was among the deadliest in the city’s history.

However, other violent crimes and property crimes are down slightly.

“We can draw a direct parallel to the number of officers we have available to our crime rate,” the chief said, noting that while he still does not feel the city has enough police officers, he is hopeful that the additional funding provided by last year’s public safety initiative will help get the TPD up to full strength by sometime next year.

In an era when police departments across the country are under heightened scrutiny over officer involved shootings, Jordan’s department has striven for total transparency. To this end, the TPD will soon have body cameras on its officers, which protects officers from false allegations as well as holding them accountable.

Jordan’s message to Tulsa’s Hispanic community is clear: “We’re everybody’s police department, including yours. We don’t want anybody to be a victim in this town and feel like they can’t call the police.” (La Semana)