To better address homelessness and public safety, Tulsa Police Chief Dennis Larsen said he needs to beef up his staff. 

Authorized for 943 officers, the department is home to about 800.

“It’s a problem that has been developing since right around the pandemic,” Larsen said. “Then, it accelerated and got worse.” 

Larsen, Tulsa Fire Chief Michael Baker and Tulsa Public Safety Commissioner Laurel Roberts participated in a discussion on homelessness and public safety Monday at the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Executive Committee meeting. Gordy Guest, the Chamber’s vice chair of community development, moderated that talk, which ran about 50 minutes.

Larsen said he is meeting next week in Washington D.C. with 70 metropolitan police chiefs from across the country.

“I can tell you that retention and wellness and recruiting are the number one issues on the table after we discuss President Trump’s initiatives,” he said.

To shore up communication with Tulsa’s growing Hispanic population, TPD often recruits bilingual officers from the areas of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, Larsen said.

“The Census tells us that 27% to 28% of our population is Hispanic,” he said. “Reality tells us that it’s more like 33% to 35%, and we know that a large portion of those arenot bilingual.”

Tulsa’s homeless number stands at an estimated 1,300 but is expected to grow this year. While the unsheltered are more visible downtown, they also are prevalent along the U.S. 169 corridor and in the retail district along 71st Street South, Larsen said.

Mitigating the problem, he said, can be a balancing act between protecting a person’s civil rights and maintaining safe ways for companies to conduct business.

“We have not had significant improvement in how we address mental health in over 30 years,” said Larsen, noting that about 30 percent of the homeless suffer from some kind of mental illness. “The federal government has failed those suffering from mental health (issues). The state government has, and to some degree, the city has. That’s changing. “

To that end, Tulsa’s Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services (COPES) is working to develop a call system that would allow mental health specialists to be sent to calls without a police request. This response could go into effect next month.

“I really want to help make Tulsa the safest biggest city,” Tulsa Public Safety Commissioner Laurel Roberts said. “That includes dealing with our homelessness.”

Mayor Monroe Nichols this month approved additional funding to allow the Tulsa Fire Department to expand its Alternative Response Team 2 (ART-2), a dedicated unit in Downtown Tulsa to decrease 911 medical call volumes and proactively serve those experiencing homelessness.

As part of the expansion, Family & Children’s Services (F&CS) will provide increased clinicians as well as case navigation. Additionally, ART-2 will move from four days per week to seven days per week, allowing services to expand by 156 days per year.

“It’s going to require a little bit of patience; it’s not an overnight fix,” Roberts said. “But you have a mayor that is truly invested in what downtown offers. We realize that people are starting to come downtown to live. A lot of people work downtown and of course, it’s a huge entertainment district.

“We want people to feel safe. We want investors to feel like it’s going to be a good return on their investment. We want to make it the safest downtown in the nation.”

Baker said his department manages a data collection service that allows it to provide HIPAA- (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), drug- and criminal justice compliance referrals.

“This population that we have that is unsheltered and living in our city, they will be here one minute and at 71st Street the next minute or on the west side,” he said. “But they always have an interaction with either 9-1-1 or they are transported to a hospital or an outreach team or criminal justice.

“What we can find is when we enter them in our database, it will find that individual and now we have information to start referring, tracking and making sure that we are getting care teams and outreach teams talking to ER (emergency room) folks, case managers and social workers to help meet that person where we are.”