Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Report No Evil - And Improve Your Peformance Rating

Nearly three years ago now, my wife and I were nearly killed by a hit and run driver on Admiral Boulevard.  I evaded the head on collision, did a 180 turn across Admiral, chased the highly impaired driver down and pulled my car in front of his pickup truck so he could not simply drive away.  We then called 911 and waited over an hour for a police officer to respond.  At one point, we watched as a TPD unit pulled in to a nearby restaurant for lunch in clear sight of what was going on.  The officer said that he could not respond  since he was "off duty" but driving his cruiser in uniform.  This week, my dear friend had his work van full of inventory stolen. We also waited over an hour and no TPD unit responded.  We watched TPD and Tulsa County Sheriff's units drive past as we waited.  We wondered where they were going and what could have been so important that they could not respond to a grand theft auto report.

Last night, it occurred to me that it is not in the police department's best interests to respond to crime if they don't have to.  They have already devalued the definition of crimes they will respond to to the point that the odds of getting an officer to respond to normal neighborhood crime are almost nil.  And now, it appears that even grand theft auto has been included in this "officer does not respond" list.

So, what is the effect if an officer does not respond?  For the police department it is all good.  Crimes that are not reported do not have to be investigated. And, they do not have to be included in the crime statistics for the city.  So, by simply defining crimes the department will respond to upward, the department has less work to do and looks better on paper.

But there is a downside.  Citizens cannot live in a society without order.  If the police department will not respond, they will respond themselves as my friend did .... by driving around a North Tulsa neighborhood doing the police department's job.  And that is very dangerous, not for the police department or the criminals but for the victim who could become another George Zimmerman for simply trying to make order out the chaos of situations the police department won't respond to.