The great copout

Mayor Bartlett and the police pay referenda

The great Anglo American poet T.S. Eliot, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” one of the most celebrated poems of the 20th century, opined that we “measure out our lives in coffee spoons.”

These days we could say we spend buckets of time trifling with weeds while blowing off the forest.

The Mayor apparently wants to deal with our policing challenges, but he is only toying with a tiny part of it. He is, as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel famously said, letting a crisis go to waste.

The Mayor recently called for an all-city referendum vote to resolve stalled pay discussions with the Tulsa Police Department and their union, the Fraternal Order of Police. On the face of it, the controversy is about a half million in additional planned compensation for Tulsa cops this year, and because of a long-standing convention, for a stipulated time to come. If the mayor gets his way, this previously agreed “satisfactory performance increase” for a big part of the police force would this year become only a “stipend.”

The Mayor has brought the discussion into play: he called for a city-wide vote on the whole matter, arguably because of the city’s calamitous budget situation. The referenda call, which the City Council must cosign, was rejected by the Council on June 5. Some days after the council defeated his call for a public vote, Bartlett elected to accept the union bonus package shortly thereafter. Some suspect that his entire call for a referendum vote was simply a bluff, an unsuccessful one that didn’t really resolve anything.

In any event, what’s actually needed is a deep re-think of the cost, shape, and future of policing in T-Town, and not just the costs of Tulsa’s police crew, but what they do, who is on tap, and how the force goes about its critical work.

What we have here is another leadership crisis. How, in a town that wants top-notch public safety, can the same be delivered given our revenue problems, the needs of the balance of the city work force (which hasn’t seen anything other than anemic salary boosts in years), and other big needs like greatly expanded park funding and funding for arts and culture? Tulsa needs a radical new model for providing policing, and the Mayor’s now-aborted call for a vote of the people doesn’t begin to address the need to revision public safety.

Mayor Bartlett and TPD Chief Chuck Jordan have explored some options. The Mayor has talked, on more than one occasion, about dumping a passel of desk-bound administrative positions and redeploying the dollars these high-salaried positions command to more field cops. But this avenue doesn’t yield the funds needed for a transformational effort, and it doesn’t begin to push down our arguably explosive public-safety cost curve.

The notions I’ve scratched out here borrow heavily from the military reform movement (MRM) led by John Boyd, William Lynd, Pierre Sprey, and former Sen. Gary Hart, plus a small set of other innovators from the ‘80s and ‘90s. MRM was an attempt to decentralize military operations, rebuild small-unit effectiveness, exploit a digitally networked system, lighter aircraft, and special operations and tactics to give American forces more agility and effectiveness. The MRM was also an attempt to use enlisted people, most of whom came to military service without college educations, plenty of avenues for garnering an understanding of complex technologies, novel battle systems, and cultures wildly different from their own. It’s an effort that arguably has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

And I’ve borrowed from the energetic effort in Chicago and Denver to rethink the separate missions, dedicated staffs, and parochial hardware. What if we provide extended emergency medical training to police and fire workers and create dual-use centers for investigations for forensic analysis, for suspect search and apprehension, and for building inspections and hazardous-material monitoring?

Both of these “movements” presume the use of fewer people, wide-scope training regimes, the exploitation of mobile communications, advanced computing systems, and even artificial intelligence. Both the military reform effort and the scattered experiments in big-city policing are tied to improving efforts to make soldiers and public-safety workers more attuned to variations in cultures, languages, and community dynamics that could improve policing in Tulsa in dramatic ways.

How about a dual-salary system where TPD veterans and experienced, superior performers are paid at a top rate that exceeds the already very generous median salaries of $72,000-plus? A dual system would also feature a lower compensation tier for new or entry-level cops and for a novel regime of high-school and college-bound apprentices and former private cops-in-training. This avenue, (which would have to be negotiated intensely with the police union and would be phased in to make good use of officer departures and retirements), would wire around Tulsa’s rigid college-degree requirements for cops and comparatively high-salaries for entry-level officers while providing additional manpower and a more diverse pool of applicants. A dual-track wage could also reconnect Tulsa policing with its youth, minority groups, women, and especially with kids and mid-career adults from Tulsa’s underrepresented west and north sides.

How about a system that would utilize military veterans, or those those who have done military-police work and have had some of the tough, multicultural, out-of-country experiences that many first-year Tulsa police recruits do not?

How about ramping up technology? What about making use of new technological advances that could reduce costs but yield a superior outcome? How about more cops on bikes (they could be new electric hybrids), more Segway units, and scrapping our hyper-expensive helicopter fleet and making use (after the expected Federal Aviation Administration’s 2015 approvals) of a small drone fleet that could do emergency surveillance and tracking of dangerous suspects, which make up the core mission of Tulsa’s helicopter cop crew? A more speculative change: using Google’s new driverless cars to conduct some routine forms of street and highway patrol.

How about an expansion of current-chief Jordan’s community-based policing model? We could try a new regimen that would use on-foot (and on-bike) cops, and TPD crews on Segways. All of these modes might provide citizens, community leaders, and retailers outside of Tulsa’s core with unprecedented access to Tulsa police. The increased confidence could only bolster public safety.

If the mayor and other of Tulsa’s leadership want to ask us to reconsider another tiny aspect of policing in T-Town, they will be making a mistake. We need a broader, more inclusive, and much bolder discussion.