Police and auditor react to city audit

TULSA - The city auditor, Preston Doerflinger, is overseeing the examination of the recommendations. He's started the process of forming committees. They will help examine the recommendations.

There are 1,100 recommendations in all. Right now, city leaders are focusing on 21 of them.

One of those recommendations includes taking some police officers out of administrative positions and putting them back on the streets, and civilians would fill the officers' administrative rolls.

While the police union likes adding officers, they do have one concern.

"The reason police officers are in administrative positions is because in order to effectively work an area you've got to know the nuts and the bolts of things that go on and what the officers on the street actually need," said Phil Evans, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Something the union does fully support is the selling of confiscated weapons.

Evans says right now the city pays to destroy them.

"We pay them (a company) to do that and then we're not getting all the benefit we could from that," said Evans.

Getting input from police and other departments is just what the city auditor plans to do.

"It's important that the employees of the city are engaged, and frankly, they're at the level that really is going to be able to help us determine if this stuff is real or not," said Preston Doerflinger, the city auditor.

He says city leaders will take their time to make sure they're doing what's best for the citizens.

"It'll be a long-term process. There will be some successes early on that everybody points to and says we should be doing that. But, there are other things that will involve larger discussions with more people about how we approach it, and there will be things that we say this just isn't right for the city of Tulsa," said Doerflinger.

The city auditor says city officials probably won't identify or implement any changes until after the first of the year.