Tulsa chief holds off on gun-pointing policy
TULSA — Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin say she might entertain the concept of requiring officers to document every time they point a firearm at a person, but he isn't inclined to install that policy without either example from other agencies or research.
Three city council ors during a meeting July 15 on use-of-force reforms conv eyed support for having police report when they point a gun or Taser toward a person. Franklin said that after the committee meeting he submitted a request to the Major Cities Chiefs of Police Association for information on use of force and metrics, including documenting displayed weaponry.
Police Maj. Matt Kirkland, who gave the council presentation, said police department doesn't intend to collect such data because there's "a very low likelihood of injury" without touching a person and that gathering and measuring "the application of actual force" is the goal.
In an interview last week with the Tulsa World, Franklin said "the jury is still out" and that he would need to determine what would be gained by capturing that data and balance department needs with officer capability. "We can create reports all day long for officers to do when they did this or when they
did that, but at the end of the day our job is to be out on the street and available to the citizens to prevent criminal acts from taking place," Franklin said. "If I have an officer that is doing nothing more than typing reports on why they had to pull their gun from their holster, that's going to make a department ineffective."
Franklin said he relies on his "sounding board," or subject matter experts and training academy personnel who reach out to others across the country.
He said they tell him that requiring officers to document each time they point a gun causes officer apprehension or hesitation to use the firearm when needed.
The police chief said he isn't sure he wants to go down that road yet, but that isn't to say he won't implement a policy like that in the future.
"We're coming off the heels of two officers being shot, and neither one of those officers were able to get their gun out of the holster to defend themselves," Franklin said. "Police officers are always, always at a disadvantage because we have to react. When you have to react, that will slow you down, and being able to have a gun out of the holster and ready for use is just something that's common sense for us because we're already operating at a disadvantage."
During the council committee meeting July 15, Councilor Kara Joy McKee said that an officer directing a weapon toward a person might create a heightened anxiety in that person, which could escalate the situation or place the officer in more danger.
Councilors Jeannie Cue and Vanessa Hall-Harper were the two other councilors who supported documenting weapon displays, with the latter being the more forceful of the three and calling it "ridiculous" that the department doesn't do it.
The Tulsa use-of-force narrative data analysis report conducted by the University of Texas at San Antonio and University of Cincinnati was released an hour before the committee meeting.
In it, the researchers ranked officer force by severity level. A fire arm display or threat ranked fourth highest out of the six categories.
The researchers compared Tulsa police to Cincinnati police use-of-force narratives and found that Tulsa officers displayed firearms twice as much as Cincinnati officers.
A Tulsa World reporter asked Franklin why he wasn't in favor of tracking a force that the researchers placed in the upper half of their force spectrum.
The police chief responded that he considers that pulling or displaying a weapon could be as low as a one because the danger is when the trigger is squeezed, not when a gun is displayed. He said those displays sometimes deescalate a situation more rapidly than just verbal communication.
The Tulsa World on t he third anniversary of Terence Crutcher's death at the hands of then-officer Betty Shelby looked at how the department's use-of-force policy changed to include deescalation language.
A researcher with Campaign ZERO, a national police reform advocacy group, had published a study days after Crutcher's killing that highlighted use-of-force policies that his work found were associated with police departments having fewer fatal shootings.
The researcher, Sam Sinyangwe, emphasized that Tulsa didn' t require comprehensive force reporting, specifically pointing firearms at people.
Documenting such force allows the department to learn how officers apply the technique, as well as whether they needlessly escalate an encounter by premature ly pointing a gun.
“When an officer points a firearm at you, that's definitely experienced as a force being used,” Sinyangwe said at the time. “It's a traumatic event, and it' s something worth tracking.”
A World article, published Sept. 16, 2019, noted that a recent study commissioned by the Phoenix Police Department presented comprehensive reporting as its No. 1 recommendation after the city experienced an unprecedented increase of police shootings in 2018 and 2019.
Police in New Orleans were under a federal consent decree since 2013 that mandated comprehensive reporting after the U.S. Department of Justice investigated an alleged pattern of civil rights violations and other misconduct.
“If I have an officer that is doing nothing more than typing reports on why they had to pull their gun from their holster, that's going to make a department ineffective.”
Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin