http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/us/tulsa-police-shooting-reaction.html 2016-09-24 03:06:23 Tulsa’s Prayers, and Past Scars, Softened Reaction to Police Shooting Some residents attribute Tulsa’s calm after a police shooting to religious restraint and the memories of a 1921 riot that left as many as 300 dead. === TULSA — White rioters poured into the streets, burning and looting homes, businesses and churches in a black neighborhood and leaving this city deeply traumatized. That was 1921. Last week, not far from where those haunting events took place, the streets of Tulsa were calm after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black motorist. The video of the shooting angered many Tulsa residents, but the subdued reaction was markedly different from the violent clashes that took place in Charlotte, N.C., in recent days, after the police killed a man there. Why one place erupts and another does not is never easy to discern. In some respects, Tulsa handled the crisis it experienced after the recent police shooting better than Charlotte, by quickly releasing videos showing the facts. But some here trace part of the reason for Tulsa’s emphasis on prayer, and not protest, in recent days to the lingering scars of the 1921 riot, which is regarded as one of the deadliest race riots in the country’s history and It had been a white mob, on the verge of a lynching, that surged through a black neighborhood, killing between 150 and 300 people, most of them black. “Having experienced the race riot, we’re not too quick to turn to violence,” said the More modern-day reasons may also help explain what unfolded in Tulsa, where the City and police officials decided to do something unexpected. Last Sunday afternoon, two days after the shooting but before the videos were publicly released, police officials showed the videos first to Mr. Crutcher’s relatives and then to more than 50 black leaders, pastors and officials. At that viewing of the video, inside a police building, some black leaders vented their anger and frustration toward the white Tulsa police chief, “The Tulsa Police Department took a gamble and it paid off,” said Marq Lewis, the founder of The viewing of the videos that Sunday turned into an emotional, impromptu town-hall-style meeting on race relations. The mayor, Mr. Bartlett, consoled Mr. Crutcher’s twin sister, who did not want to view the videos and walked out of the room. “We gave the community a real good chance to vent,” Mr. Bartlett said. The officer charged with killing Mr. Crutcher, Betty Jo Shelby, 42, was arrested, booked and bonded out early on Friday morning at the county criminal-justice center. In court documents, Officer Shelby is accused of overreacting to Mr. Crutcher’s refusal to follow her commands although she saw no evidence that he was armed. Officer Shelby’s “fear resulted in her unreasonable actions” and even though Mr. Crutcher was not responsive to her and was walking away from her, she became “emotionally involved to the point that she overreacted,” prosecutors wrote in court documents. Although she was armed with a Blacks make up only about 11 percent of Whites and blacks now routinely push to try to resolve racial issues before they reach flash points. “We’ve seen the other side,” said Jack Henderson, who is black and has represented much of north Tulsa for 14 years on the City Council, “and it’s not pretty.” Community leaders have worked together, sometimes uneasily, to keep a number of disputes in recent years from growing into something worse. In 2012, when five black Tulsans were shot, three of them fatally, from a roving vehicle driven by two men, black leaders publicly decried the African-American community’s fear that the city’s white-run police department would drag its feet in solving the crime. But they also went on television to urge residents to remain calm and let the department prove them wrong. In the end, the shootings were solved. “People have trust in their leadership,” said Mr. Blakney and others gave credit for some progress to Tulsa’s mayor, Mr. Bartlett, who they said has worked hard to establish ties with the black community in north Tulsa, attending Sunday services at African-American churches most weekends. That is not to say that relations between African-Americans and the police department are untroubled. Black leaders say that ties have frayed since the department abandoned a community policing policy from decades past, and switched to more aggressive patrol tactics that involved less face-to-face contact with residents. This summer, a white police major whose district included much of north Tulsa was transferred from his post amid an outcry after he responded to a sniper’s shootings of police officers in Dallas by posting an online article stating, “We are at war.” Since the national debate over police violence against blacks flared in the last two years, the Tulsa Police Department has pledged to shift resources toward community policing, said “Let’s say relations could be vastly improved,” she said. “Yet when it comes to community relations, in some of the protests that have taken place in the last week, the officers have willingly escorted the protesters in a very good way. We’re appreciative that they allowed the video to be seen. They didn’t have to do that.” In the 1980s, Tulsa was a national model for community policing under North Tulsans loved it, Mr. Blakney said. But in 1991, Mr. Diamond quit his job, citing nonstop harassment from the police union and Republicans on the City Council. He since has become one of the nation’s leading experts on community policing. “At the time, some people looked on him as bringing in a babysitter mentality to the police department,” said Mr. Henderson, the city councilman. “At the time they ran him off, he had it right. Now, we’re trying to get them back to it.”