The City of Tulsa has refused to release records related to a series of deaths at its municipal jail that would answer basic questions about how people died in custody. 

An investigation by The Frontier identified seven deaths over three years from preventable causes, including overdoses, suicides, an infection ​​and one case involving a detainee who died in a restraint device. The small, windowless jail holds people arrested on municipal misdemeanor charges — many of them experiencing severe mental illness. 

City officials say the Tulsa Police Department investigated each death and found no violations of the law or jail policy. But the city has declined to release reports from those investigations or surveillance video from the facility. 

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“Why should Tulsans believe their police department’s findings when city officials fight to hide the related records from the public?” said Joey Senat, professor emeritus of media law at Oklahoma State University. “By refusing to provide documents that should shed more light on what happened, officials are sending the message that city employees did something wrong — that they in some way caused the death of detainees.”

The city declined to comment, citing the potential for litigation over the records denials. The Frontier is contesting the denials with attorney Leslie Briggs of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

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In response to The Frontier’s reporting, Mayor Monroe Nichols directed the city’s public safety commissioner, Laurel Roberts, to “conduct an additional review” of the jail’s operations in February. The city said the review is still underway but did not say whether its findings will be made public.

Many questions remain unanswered about the deaths, including whether detainees sought help before they died and whether staff checked on them as often as required.

The Tulsa Police Department denied The Frontier’s request for the death investigations and jail surveillance video, citing a state law that exempts some law enforcement records from disclosure. After push back from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the city says it is taking a second look at the request to determine whether it will release additional information. 

Senat said nothing in the law prevents the city from releasing the records voluntarily. The Tulsa Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. 

Tulsa outsources the jail’s day-to-day operations to Allied Universal, a multinational private security firm. The police department initially denied The Frontier’s requests for other records — including jail policies, incident reports and inmate observation logs — arguing that because they are held by the company, they are not public. The department described the jail's policies as "proprietary." In a Jan. 9 response to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the department said it was reviewing the requests but has not released any records since. 

In a 2017 decision, the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals said public agencies cannot bypass the state’s Open Records Act by outsourcing government functions to private companies.

The city's contract with Allied Universal requires the company to retain records and make them accessible to the city on demand.

“To allow the government to avoid the Open Records Act by having public records in the hands of private contractors would defeat the public’s interest in assuring that its government is properly performing its job,” Senat said.