TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa police plan to roll out the new downtown curfew ordinance with grace and education at the forefront.
Beginning June 26, minors cannot be in the Inner Dispersal Loop after 9 PM. Captain Richard Meulenberg said they understand most young people may not have gotten the message.
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“This is going to be a tool we can use reactively and proactively," he said. "There’s a lot of caution about how we’ll go about this because we still have to do our job, reactionary, so officers are going to use reasonable suspicion, and a lot of this stuff is going to be because we were called to the area.”
The enforcement of the curfew will be at an officer's discretion. Meulenberg compared it to a traffic stop.
“When we have an engagement with someone, we can document that," he said. "We can keep track. We do what we call a field interview report, which is a non-criminal documentation. So lets say we run into John Smith and John Smith says 'you know I had no idea I wasn’t supposed to be here.' Okay, John, here it is: on the weekends, you can’t come down here after 9 o'clock. Then off he goes."
While a string of downtown violence has the community on edge, Meuleunberg said the earlier curfew isn't a direct reaction, nor necessarily even related.
“To say the IDL is this big driving factor for these shootings would be a misnomer; that’s not entirely accurate," he said. "These two things are happening to coalesce together, but we were having problems in the IDL prior to this last weekend.”
Issues will come if and when an individual chooses to continually violate or not follow an officer's orders to leave the IDL.
WHAT IS THE IDL?
“If we have to issue a citation for curfew, you will be going to court. Juvenile court, and they’ll work with your time, but you can’t go alone. You have to bring a parent with you now, so the parents now, they’re inconvenienced for sure, but sorry, your kid was out here clearly in violation. Help us help them,” said Meulenberg.
In the last five years, Tulsa police have written 172 curfew violations.
WATCH: How will the downtown curfew be enforced?
Even with an earlier curfew, Meulenberg doesn't anticipate that number going up.
“We understand that kids want to be with other kids, they want to assemble, but theres a high demand from businesses, a high demand from people living down there and the adults down there participating in this late night activity, they don’t want kids around there either, so we have to look out for what everybody wants and keep our kids safe."
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2 News asked if Meulenberg thinks the curfew will help with crowd control, because that issue has been brought up a number of times with recent tragedies.
“Well, the idea is most of our crowd control issues take place later in the evening when the bars are closing at 2 o'clock in the morning, 1:30 in the morning, or pretty close proximity to that," said Meulenberg. "We don’t have crowd control issues typically at 9 o'clock in life.”
"Is it about keeping these kids safe or that the kids are a part of the violence?" we asked.
"It's a little bit of both," said Meulenberg. “We’ll never know the impact.We don’t know today that we could be saving the life of some 16-year-old who might get injured or shot inadvertently by being down there.”
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