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Tulsa Jail Withholds Records Related to Detainee Deaths
The Frontier, a non-profit investigative news outlet in Oklahoma, recently found that seven detainees died from preventable causes in Tulsa’s municipal jail over a three-year period. These deaths occurred due to causes such as overdoses, suicides, an infection, and at least one restraint-related incident. The jail, which is small and windowless, typically locks people up who have been arrested on misdemeanor charges—and many of them suffer from severe mental illnesses.
City officials claim that each of the deaths were investigated by the Tulsa Police Department and assessed that no legal or policy violations had occurred. But when requested by The Frontier, the City has so far refused to provide documentation or video evidence from the jail to support their no-fault claim. As an expert interviewed by the publication pointed out, Tulsa’s refusal has the whiff of an admission of guilt. By not providing records, Joey Senat, a professor emeritus of media law at Oklahoma State University told The Frontier, “officials are sending the message that city employees did something wrong—that they in some way caused the death of detainees.”
In February, after news of the deaths broke, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols ordered “an additional review” of the jail’s operations, but did not indicate whether the findings of the audit will be public. The City outsources those operations to Allied Universal, a multinational private security firm. Some of The Frontier’s requests, for jail policies, incident logs, and other items, were denied by the police department because they claimed Allied Universal—as a private entity—did not need to make the records public.
According to a 2017 decision by the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals, however, public agencies are not exempt from the state’s Open Records Act simply because they contract with companies like Allied Universal. They must, instead, retain records and make them public on request. See: Ross v. City of Owasso, 2017 OK CIV APP 4.
The Frontier is challenging the records denials with attorney Leslie Briggs, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
Source: The Frontier
