Tulsa police. DYLAN GOFORTH/The Frontier
On Sept. 13, police recorded 16 burglaries — 14 of which were into people’s homes.
There were six reports of cars being stolen on Sunday.
Around noon on Monday, Police found a man fatally shot just past the front door of a house. The homicide brought Tulsa to 63 killings this year, a number that has since risen.
The alleged crimes all took place in Tulsa within a week — from Sept. 11 to 18 — when people reported more than 350 crimes to the Tulsa Police Department.
Those crimes include rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults. Police recorded four homicides during that time.
With 65 killings so far this year, Tulsa is on track to exceed last year’s homicide record of 82, said Tulsa Police Homicide Sgt. David Walker.
“At this pace, we don’t know what’s driving it or what will make it stop,” Walker said. “We will blow past 82.”
Tulsa Police Department has eight detectives investigating the city’s homicides. With the large caseload, the department has had to change how homicide cases are assigned, Walker said.
Previously the agency had two teams of detectives that handled investigations at alternating times of the week. Now, the agency has only one team.
“We have people fresh and ready to go to the next one, but it’s starting to wear on us just a little bit,” Walker said.
As of Wednesday evening, TPD had 10 homicide cases open.
Along with homicides, Walker’s detectives investigate aggravated assaults, non-fatal shootings and stalking cases. That means the team has to prioritize cases. And usually, that means homicides are the first concern, Walker said.
Other types of cases might be left waiting, and detectives will get to them when they have time, he said.
In Tulsa, compared to the first six months of 2015, the same period in 2016 saw a 24 percent increase in violent crime. In 2015, Tulsa reported the first increase in violent crime since 2008. Before last year, reports of violent crime had been on a decline.
In cities across the country, murder increased in 2016, one year after it rose at its fastest pace in a quarter century.
Still, the overall violent crime rate in Tulsa remains low compared to historic standards.
The Tulsa Police Department reported it highest amount of violent crimes in 1992 with 5,008 reports.
The issue of the rise in violent crime has drawn nationwide attention, as President Donald Trump often pointing to the nationwide increase as evidence of a breakdown in law under former-President Barack Obama. However, the murder rate is still about the same as when Obama was elected in 2008.
The Marshall Project, which The Frontier partners with for its Next To Die project, has used a widely accepted statistical calculation to get a weighted average of recent years — smoothing out the year-to-year fluctuations that are common to crime data.
Certain crimes reported to the Tulsa Police Department from Sept. 11 to 18.
Data source: Tulsa Police Department
Data source: Tulsa Police Department
From Sept. 11 to 18, Tulsa police responded to more than 300 reports of crime. Click on the map to learn more.
