Chat With The Chief: Gun-Related Incidents Involving Teens, New TPD Equipment

It's been a month since Tulsa's new Police Chief, Dennis Larsen, took the helm. He sat down with News On 6 to share insights on his first month in charge and to address the recent rise in gun-related incidents involving teens.

LeAnne Taylor: I'm anxious to hear 3060 days in how are you feeling?

Chief Larsen: I think I think of myself as a dust till dawn, because it seems like it's a 24-hour job, day job, and it's been that way. But I expected a lot of that having helped on board two or three different the last chiefs. So a lot of public appearances, a lot of meetings with citizens who want them to make sure they're being heard and finding out different demographics around the town of where we need to maybe refocus some of our efforts to make sure we're doing everything we need to do.

LeAnne Taylor: Conversations also with officers as well the rank and file, if you will.

Chief Larsen: Yes, and that's something that we're expanding going into the fall. The summer is our busiest time, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, our calls peak, and right after Labor Day, as we go into the fall in the school and the kids are back in school, we see a decline in our calls, and it's almost like the whole department can take a breath. And that's when I'd always planned on assuming command, and August 1, get past Labor Day. I don't want to add one more thing for the officers to do, to come talk with the chief, but we have some listening sessions scheduled coming up, and we started planning on making different squad meetings so they have a chance to ask me directly questions they have about our day to day operations.

LeAnne Taylor: I want to talk about the recent headlines. Obviously, a shooting yesterday in Georgia, a couple of high schools that had guns last week, and a rental space with some teens doing gunplay and shots fired. It's hard. I mean, it's hard to do your job. But then when you have these random people with guns and these, what is your, what is your take on all that?

Chief Larsen: Well, first off, know that your public school systems, all of them, union Jinx, Broken Arrow. Owasso, Tulsa public schools, all of them have done their homework. They have good processes in place to address gun violence. We saw yesterday where unions acted quickly when they had found out information that a student had brought a gun on campus, and they stopped anything from happening, not that anything was planned, but they reacted properly, and they reacted quickly.

The biggest thing in common with all of these things is, if you look at the young adult that's usually involved, where they got the firearm, it was either stolen and it was being passed around on the street, or it came out of the house where they lived in and the parents didn't have it secured. I would like to just reiterate, going into this school year that parents really need to know if there's going to be an after party, after a football or sporting event. As my wife and I did, we would always call the home of the party where the party was happening and speak to the parents, saying, Are you going to be there? The Airbnb we had a house full of under-18-year-olds, and somebody brought a gun, and from all evidence so far, it accidentally went off, but we almost lost a star athlete. And, you know, it just should never have happened. And there's got to be, you know, some responsibility on the Airbnb owners that they check and make sure the people who are renting the house is are actually those who show up, because almost all of them check no parties. Well, when you see 15 to 55 people walk through your front door, you can kind of assume there's a party going on.

LeAnne Taylor: And I don't know if I want I don't know if you can answer this. Is there the possibility there could be liability for those homeowners?

Chief Larsen: I don't know. But if I were a homeowner, I'd be worried, certainly, if you have the ability to determine what's going on at that house, most of them have doorbell cameras. They can see how many people are coming in, and now you start seeing a steady stream of young adults and not one adult. If I was that homeowner, I'd be over there going no

LeAnne Taylor: shutting it down. Just yesterday, the Tulsa police foundation made a donation of 10 ballistic shields. Captain Muhlenberg is so graciously going to show us one of those shields I had a chance to lift it. It's pretty heavy. Tell us about the importance of this addition to the department.

Chief Larsen: Well first off, the donations the Foundation put together to buy eight of those, or I'm sorry, 10 of those are about $8,000 each is incredible, and that stemmed from our shooting two years ago at St Francis, where we had an active shooter, and you saw officers jumping and running towards St Francis that day. Some of them had shields. Most of them were not rifle-rated, which means that particular shield that captain Meulenberg is holding can stop a two to three-round, or an AR 15 or an SKS round, which what that does is allows us to do our mission, and we always want to give the officers the tools to complete their mission, because their basic mission is public safety, to protect those innocents. And if with that shield, and there's now a total of 13 of those shields in our department we are eventually trying to move to where every squad Lieutenant has one of those shields available to him, so if they get a call, they don't have to call and wait minutes for one of those to arrive, because we need to be able to get and we need to be able to address and stop the issue of the problem.