Tulsa Mayor
G.T. Bynum. | Matt Barnard/Tulsa World via AP
LETTER FROM
OKLAHOMA
How Tulsa’s Republican Mayor Found Himself at the
Center of America’s Debate on Race
G.T. Bynum’s faltering efforts on police reform took a
hit after George Floyd’s killing. It hasn’t gotten any easier with President
Trump coming to town.
By BRET
SCHULTE
06/19/2020
05:53 PM EDT
Bret
Schulte is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas.
TULSA,
Oklahoma—By almost any measure, this has been a terrible month for Tulsa Mayor
G. T. Bynum.
Like almost
every other city in America, Tulsa was the scene of major protests after the
killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked major protests. Demonstrators
tried to take over an interstate highway and some even marched to Bynum’s
house, an act he called “intimidation.” In a city that was the site of the nation’s
most notorious massacre of black residents, hundreds of whom were murdered in
their homes by a white mob, the mayor’s insinuation that he felt threatened by
unarmed protesters didn’t sit well in the black community.
It only got
worse. Bynum, a mild-mannered 43-year-old with tortoise-shell glasses, gave an
interview on national television that downplayed the role of race in a widely
publicized police shooting. No sooner had he apologized for his “dumb and
overly simplistic” comment than one of his highest-ranking officers said that
police should statistically be shooting more black people “based on the crimes
committed.”
In the
middle of all this, President Trump, whose provocative rhetoric after Floyd’s
death inflamed tensions across the country, announced he would come to Tulsa to
hold his first rally since the coronavirus pandemic had ended his public
campaigning. Bynum, a moderate Republican, has stressed he had nothing to do
with Trump’s visit, but he resisted repeated calls to cancel the rally at the
19,000-seat BOK Center in downtown. He did not respond to interview requests
made to his office. In a public statement, he said that an event in the middle
of a spike in Covid-19 cases “isn’t ideal.”
Now Tulsa,
population just under 400,000, is preparing for the arrival of tens of
thousands of Trump supporters and counter-protesters. High steel fencing lines
streets through downtown, which Bynum placed under curfew starting Thursday
night in fear that “organized groups who have been involved in destructive and
violent behavior in other States are planning to travel to the City of Tulsa
for purposes of causing unrest in and around the rally.” Trump torqued up the
tension Friday morning with a tweet threat: “Any protesters, anarchists,
agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you
will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis.”
Whatever
happens over the coming hours and days is unlikely to make Bynum’s job easier.
Even before Floyd’s death spurred the Black Lives Matter movement into
overdrive, Bynum found himself in a political vise increasingly familiar to
mayors in cities across the conservative heart of the country. He represents a
city where Republicans outnumber Democrats by about two to one. But over the
course of his four years in office Bynum has made conscious efforts to reform a
police department that arrests black people at twice the rate of white people
and that has been condemned for controversial killings of black men. In
February, Bynum appointed Tulsa’s first black police chief.
But like so
much in the Bynum administration, the move has failed to resonate with some
black voters, who regard Police Chief Wendell Franklin as a police force
insider rather than a true agent of change. In recent days the pace of that
change, and Bynum’s commitment to it, has come into question as the mayor has
tried to mediate a fraught negotiation about civilian oversight of the police.
Almost everyone involved—the police union and Black Lives Matter
supporters—have expressed feelings of betrayal by the mayor who they accuse of
flip-flopping on the issue.
At a Wednesday
press conference, Franklin said, “The eyes of the world are upon us now. We are
ready.”
Bynum’s
leadership of Tulsa once had a sense of destiny.
His uncle,
grandfather, and great great grandfather all held the same position. Elected in
the summer of 2016, Bynum seemed eager to bridge racial divides that have
lingered for nearly a century. He declared he wanted “One Tulsa,” and launched
a fact-gathering mission to quantify racial disparities such areas as policing,
education and housing and created the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity
to pilot reforms.
Then, just
weeks after he was elected, a white female officer shot and killed Terence
Crutcher, an unarmed black man who had stopped his car in the middle of the
road. The shooting was captured on video by a circling police helicopter. The
officer was charged with manslaughter. There was a flurry of national attention
but in the black community the outrage never disappeared.
Then in
2017, it happened again. Tulsa County deputies shot Joshua Barre, a mentally
ill 29-year-old black man who was wandering the street with two knives. Only
three weeks before, the officer who shot Crutcher had been acquitted.
Bynum,
meanwhile, promoted economic investment in the predominantly black
neighborhoods of North Tulsa. And, to address long-standing fear and anger from
black residents toward the Tulsa Police Department, Bynum proposed in January
2019 establishing an Office of Independent Monitor to provide oversight, based
on a model he admired in Denver.
The mayor
also responded to the request of leaders in the black community, such as the Rev.
Robert Turner, to create a commission to investigate the whereabouts of mass
graves from the 1921 massacre and placed the pastor on the commission. City
officials and community leaders hoped bodies could be exhumed and given a
proper burial for the centennial anniversary next year.
“I think
the mayor has done a good job of engaging that, more so than any mayor I can
remember in Tulsa,” said Corbin Brewster, the chief public defender of Tulsa
County. “Then you have Trump announce he’s going to have a rally... That just
magnifies all those fissures and second guessing and pressure on our city
officials.”
But others
feel the problems are self-inflicted. The Office of Independent Monitor stalled
after pressure from the police union and disagreement on details among city
council and activists.
And Turner
nearly quit the committee charged with overseeing the survey and excavation of
mass graves from the massacre because of how slowly the city was moving and how
narrowly it conducted its search. The work is now on pause indefinitely as a
result of the pandemic, even though the state has largely opened up.
But the
days after the George Floyd killing have been especially challenging for Bynum,
who has seemed to pinball between defensiveness and stubborn insistence on “law
and order.”
Not long
after he complained of “intimidation” by activists, Bynum appeared on a
conservative talk radio show on June 1. He continued his criticism while
defending law enforcement. Within the day, however, he met with the activists,
including the Rev. Turner, and agreed to a number of their demands, such as
ending LivePD in Tulsa, a reality law-enforcement show featuring local cops on
the beat. He agreed to meet with the Crutcher family, which had filed a civil
lawsuit against the city, and to re-new his push for the Office of Independent
Monitor.
Conservatives
accused him of flip flopping. Jerad Lindsey, chairman of the Tulsa Fraternal
Order of Police described himself as “completely blindsided.” He added that the
mayor owed the police officers of Tulsa an explanation.
Meanwhile,
public relations disasters kept exploding around Bynum.
On June 8,
Major Travis Yates of the Tulsa Police Department, made national headlines with
his remark on local talk radio that police were “shooting African-Americans
about 24 percent less than we ought to be, based on the crimes being
committed.” The mayor condemned the comments but Yates kept his job, pending an
internal investigation. Shortly thereafter, Tulsa Police made national news
again, this time with a video of police officers roughly arresting black
teenagers for walking in a street.
In the midst
of this, Bynum appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” in a segment about the
historical racial strife in Tulsa, saying that it was drug use rather than race
that played a factor in the killing of Terence Crutcher. “After meeting with
the mayor and thinking we were moving in the right direction, we hear him make
those egregious comments,” said Tiffany Crutcher, the twin sister of Terence
who has risen to prominence in Tulsa as an activist after creating the Terence
Crutcher Foundation to advocate for civil rights. “I was nauseated.”
Bynum
apologized. “When your friends start calling you and repeatedly use the phrase
‘I know your heart’, it is a good indicator you’ve screwed up,” he wrote on
Twitter. But the damage was done.
Within days
Tiffany Crutcher recruited a board member of her foundation, Greg Robinson, to
run for office against Bynum in August, bringing the total challengers to
seven. “This is part of our three-year push for change,” Crutcher said. “We
just felt we needed to take it to the next level.” Crutcher is his campaign
manager.
Meanwhile,
the Fraternal Order of Police isn’t forgetting Bynum’s remarks either.
Lindsey
told me the mayor has “not yet” but is close to losing support of the police.
“We are giving him a lot of latitude because Tulsa is a unique place and this
is a unique time in history.” Still, the police union opposes his proposal for
the Office of Independent Monitor, arguing that it will result in less
policing, not better policing. Lindsey said the cops in Denver told him they work
in fear of residents reporting them to the city’s OIM for doing their jobs.
“What is the easiest way to not get a complaint?” he asks. “Not to engage. You
have guys sitting in parking lots; they don’t drive neighborhoods.”
A
five-minute drive in Tulsa can take you from the growing camp of defiant
President Trump supporters at the BOK Center to a place that feels both far
away and uncomfortably close: the Vernon Chapel A.M.E. Church, which was burned
in the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre that killed some 300 black Tulsans.
The church
was soon rebuilt, but it now needs million in repairs it can’t afford. Annual
revenue is $200,000 per year, and the congregation is elderly and few—just 135
worshippers. “I know churches with Sunday School classes larger than our whole
membership,” Pastor Turner told me this week. “But God chose us to be his
vessel.”
Turner, 37,
keeps a bullhorn and a sign at his desk that reads in all caps: REPARATIONS
NOW. He has led the fight to identify and excavate the mass graves of victims
of the Tulsa race massacre and secure compensation for their descendants, many
of whom make up his congregation.
His church
is responding to Trump’s presence by hosting two rallies: one on Friday, the
99th anniversary of Juneteenth, the date that commemorates the Emancipation
Proclamation, and the other opposite the president’s rally on Saturday evening.
Raising the profile of the event, is the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is flying in to
deliver an address Friday night. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is claiming so
much enthusiasm that it has rented a second venue near the BOK Center for an
overflow crowd.
“Unless he
has changed his political strategy, I’m concerned that [Trump] is going to
charge them up,” said Turner. “His last campaign was very high on vitriol and
bombast. So you get filled with that for however long he’s going to speak, and
God knows what those folks are going to want to do.”
The
National Guard has been activated, but Turner is worried enough that he is not
counting on them or local police alone to keep the peace. So he has hired
private security for his rally. “As a Christian I do not worry,” Turner says.
“As a human being, I have concerns. I just pray to God to protect us. I
know he can. I pray he will.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário