SITE OVERVIEW ♦TULSA | OKLAHOMA
Target Area: The 61st and Peoria Neighborhood • Population: 8,700
Fiscal Agent: City of Tulsa
Research Partner: The Institute of Crime Science at the University of Cincinnati
Crime Concerns: Aggravated assaults, homicides, and other violent crimes
BCJI Funding Year: 2014 Planning | 2016 Implementation
Neighborhood Profile
The 61st and Peoria neighborhood encompasses an area of just over a square mile and is a predominately White (42%) and African American (26%) community. The median household income is under $25,000 and 39 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. Historically, the target area has experienced more violent crime in comparison to the city as a whole. In 2013, 14 percent of all homicides in the city occurred in the 61st and Peoria neighborhood and the assault rate was twice as high as the city’s rate. In addition, the violent crime rate of the target area exceeded the city rate by 2.3 times in 2010, 3 times in 2011, and 2.6 times in 2012.
Planning Process
Over the course of 2015, the planning process for the Tulsa BCJI project involved multiple organizations and stakeholders including the Tulsa Police Department (Riverside Division), the neighborhood associations of Heller Park, Riverside South, and Southern Hills View, and the Tulsa Public School District. The BCJI planning team focused on community organizing and resource mobilization, sponsoring regular clean-up efforts and engaging residents in discussions of critical public infrastructure issues. The Tulsa Police Department helped facilitate this process by launching an online attitude and opinion survey to receive feedback on its interaction with the community. BCJI partners also worked with researchers to understanding findings from crime mapping, social network analysis, radial analysis, electronic monitoring data analysis, and qualitative analysis of incidents such as field observations and interviews. The following outlines several notable findings from these combined efforts:
- In 2014, 70.5 percent of felonious assaults were concentrated in five hot spots. Low-income, apartment housing complexes were the most common features associated with these hotspots, particularly an apartment complex in the E 62nd and S Peoria area.
- Residents reported that they are fearful of victimization and perceived crime to be a problem in the community with 72.2 percent of residents reporting they are afraid to walk alone after dark, 74.4 percent reporting they are afraid of being robbed, and 77.1 percent reporting they are worried of someone breaking into their residence.
Implementation Strategies
The Tulsa BCJI team is pursuing a two-tier implementation phase as a way to reduce crime, fear and perceptions of risk among residents. Specifically, the Tulsa Police Department is working with members of the community to integrate components of “Operation Burglary Countdown,” which aims to build social cohesion at the individual level and improve collaboration with the local criminal justice system. The broad capacity of this approach has enabled the partnership to engage in the following practices:
- Launch of home visits performed by law enforcement officers and apartment managers to provide security and crime prevention advice to residents.
- Implementation of an “Eyes on the Street” program, which encourages the community at large to report any behavior that negatively impacts the quality of life in the target area.
- Continued community engagement-related activities such as emailing alerts about local crime in real time, developing youth recreation programs, distributing crime prevention materials, and encouraging attendance of community agencies and local management meetings.
- Incorporation of proactive policing techniques such as targeted patrols.
In addition, Tulsa was among 10 cities forming the country’s first Resilience AmeriCorps, which aimed to engage Tulsa residents and strengthen the community. Additionally, the city was selected as a site of What Works Cities. This initiative works with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University, and the Sunlight Foundation to enhance the City's current open data system by releasing data in a more useful and responsive format for the public. The aid from these initiatives helped the City of Tulsa with bolstering and evaluating their community engagement efforts and successes as well as enabled the City to serve as a model of best practices for other sites.
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