Whenever a black man dies at the hands of police, Tiffany Crutcher must bear witness. This is what people seem to think. She does not seek out the initial headlines hesitant to assign blame, the cries for transparency on social media, the eventual gruesome video evidence. They flood her in-boxes anyway, as her friends and online followers assume she will know how to make sense of things. As if she has peered beyond the veil and returned with a wisdom that she can share at a time of crisis. The torrent began anew on Tuesday, May 26th, when people began sending her articles about George Floyd.
Crutcher, a physical therapist turned criminal-justice-reform activist, was on her sofa in Tulsa, Oklahoma, working from home, owing to COVID-19. She saw a picture of a police officer with his knee on Floyd’s neck. She felt nauseated. She watched a short video clip of Floyd calling out for his mother as the life was choked out of him. She felt angry. Over the next few days, a cruel cocktail of emotions familiar to far too many black people—rage, fear, sadness—made it difficult for her to sleep.
But there was work to be done, and certain expectations for how to respond properly. Over the last several years, as cell-phone videos have documented with increased frequency the killings of unarmed black people, Americans have developed an intuitive understanding of the prescribed boundaries of outrage. On Facebook, Crutcher encouraged people to call leaders in Minneapolis and demand justice for Floyd. She used all the familiar hashtags: #blacklivesmatter, #icantbreathe, #policereformNOW. At a May 28th press conference organized by black community leaders, at a North Tulsa church, she spoke with a halting exhaustion that carried the weight of much more than the past few days’ events. “Here we are, yet again, angry and devastated at the killing of another unarmed black man by law enforcement,” she said, in front of a phalanx of impassive cameras. “The compounded trauma that my family, that our community, that we endure is real.”
Crutcher had exchanged so many words over the years in city-council meetings, social-media posts, town halls, and press conferences. “Is this going to help anything?” she recalls thinking that day. “They’re not hearing us.” In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, she felt hopeless, pantomiming solutions that didn’t seem to be moving the criminal-justice system far enough or fast enough. And, even as her allies made similar comments in the lobby of the church, denouncing racism and calling for change, her pain was different. Her urgency would be, too. “It was almost as if Terence had died all over again,” she told me.
Terence Crutcher loved to sing. When he and Tiffany, his twin sister, were children, they developed a mutual love of music. She played the viola and he played the cello. The pair celebrated their fortieth birthday, in August of 2016, with a phone call discussing Terence’s plans to return to school and one day open a music-production studio. They spoke of their hopes and dreams for the second half of their lives.
One month later, on the evening of September 16th, Terence’s car was left idling in the middle of a North Tulsa road. He had recently left Tulsa Community College, where he was enrolled in a music-appreciation class. Terence abandoned the vehicle and was behaving erratically, according to eyewitness accounts. One witness said that, when his wife saw a distressed man walking down the road, she wanted to help the man, because he appeared to be in need of medical attention. But the witness said that he was afraid to approach Terence. Instead, at least two observers on the scene called 911. Terence’s next encounter was with a Tulsa Police Department officer named Betty Shelby.
Aerial footage from a police helicopter showed Terence walking toward his vehicle with his hands up as Shelby walked behind him, gun drawn. “That looks like a bad dude,” the helicopter’s pilot, Michael Richert, said in the video clip. “Could be on something.” Three more officers arrived at the scene. Shelby and two other officers pointed weapons at Terence, and he walked back toward his car with his hands up. As Terence stood by the driver-side door of his vehicle, Shelby fired a shot into his chest, causing him to crumple to the ground. She would later claim that Terence was reaching into his car window, though lawyers for the Crutcher family said the window was closed. Terence was unarmed, and police found no weapons in his vehicle. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital that night.
Shelby was arrested six days after killing Terence, and charged with first-degree manslaughter. She chose to stage an unusually public defense. In an interview with “60 Minutes” before her trial, Shelby said that Terence caused his own death. “I saw a threat, and I used the force I felt necessary to stop a threat,” she said. Tiffany Crutcher, who had always shared in her twin brother’s pain, became Terence’s public advocate. “She wasn’t called to the scene because Terence was committing a crime,” Crutcher said, of Shelby. “She just noticed a car in the middle of the road, and the outcome was my brother was murdered.”
Shelby’s legal defense built on the arguments she had laid out on “60 Minutes.” At her trial, the following month, she said that she had feared for her life because of Terence’s behavior. She said that Terence had refused to comply with her repeated orders to stop and get on his knees. While she described him as “very big” and looking like a “zombie,” she overestimated his height by three inches and his weight by forty-six pounds. Defense lawyers suggested that Terence had been dangerous in the past, as well as on the night he was shot by Shelby. They outlined portions of his criminal record during the trial, and hinged much of their argument on a toxicology report that revealed that PCP, a hallucinogenic drug, had been in Terence’s system at the time of his death. No one claimed that Terence had behaved in an aggressive or violent manner. The perceived threat of violence, Shelby and her lawyers said, was enough.
A jury consisting of nine white people and three black people agreed. Shelby was acquitted of all charges on May 17th, 2017, and whisked out of the courtroom within moments of the announcement of the verdict. (After resigning from the Tulsa Police Department, she was hired by the Rogers County Sheriff’s Office, and taught a class to other officers on “surviving the aftermath” of shooting someone while in uniform.) Crutcher, standing with her father before the news cameras in the courthouse, was left to stew in the aftermath of the verdict. Her grief quickly crystallized into conviction. “I’m going to make sure that I don’t rest until we get reform for this police department in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” she said.
It was a monumental task. The relationship between Tulsa police and the black residents they are bound to protect was poisoned nearly a hundred years ago, in 1921, when white rioters burned down the thriving black neighborhood of Greenwood, which had become known as Black Wall Street because of its success. Whites destroyed more than a thousand homes and killed as many as three hundred residents. Many of the vandals were deputized by police, and they herded black Tulsans into internment camps, where the detainees were held by armed guards for as long as two weeks. None of the perpetrators faced serious criminal prosecution. For decades afterward, Tulsa police followed an unspoken rule that white cops would not follow African-American suspects across the railroad tracks and into North Tulsa, which is predominantly black. Such policies extended nearly into the twenty-first century, with black officers claiming, in a 1994 lawsuit, that they were often denied backup from their white colleagues and were routinely deprived of raises and promotions. (The suit was settled in 2002, with the department agreeing to multiple reforms.)
But, beyond the calluses of history, Terence’s murder was characterized by the wounds of the current moment. Shortly before he was killed, Tulsa-area officers had shot two other unarmed black men. In 2014, an off-duty Tulsa Police Department officer drove to the home of Jeremy Lake, his daughter’s black boyfriend, and shot him twice, killing him. In 2015, a Tulsa County volunteer sheriff’s deputy accidentally fired his gun instead of his Taser, killing a fleeing suspect, Eric Harris. Both officers were found guilty of manslaughter, though Lake’s killer was only convicted after three mistrials. A study released by the city of Tulsa and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2018, called the Equality Indicators Report, found that black residents were more than twice as likely as white ones to experience the use of force from police officers.
Tiffany hoped to build a coalition of residents who could reverse these trends and halt the tragedies. In 2017, she formed the Terence Crutcher Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal-justice reform and provides scholarships for students who are interested in the arts. “What Dr. Crutcher does incredibly well is she brings people from all perspectives and backgrounds to the table,” Greg Robinson, a local community organizer and member of the Terence Crutcher Foundation’s board, told me. Robinson recalled meeting Crutcher for the first time over Budweisers and beef brisket, at a gathering of community activists that she had convened several months after Shelby’s acquittal. “As she says, we’re her volunteer army.”
In May of 2018, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, the Terence Crutcher Foundation, and a variety of community leaders issued a letter to the mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, demanding a wide range of police reforms. Among the most urgent was the establishment of an independent agency to investigate lethal encounters with police, commonly known as an office of the independent monitor. Such an agency would be able to immediately inspect a crime scene where an officer fired a weapon, reëxamine evidence and witnesses, and recommend discipline for police misconduct.
The independent monitor in Denver, Colorado, which was created in 2004, has all of those powers. That city’s office is considered one of the most powerful in the nation, and it has a staff of twelve, which includes attorneys, policy analysts, and community-outreach managers. In 2017, the Denver monitor challenged its police force’s lax use-of-force standards, prompting a more stringent policy, and the office has successfully advocated for the suspension of officers who inappropriately fired their weapons. “Any time a Denver officer fires his or her weapon, I get called by dispatch, just like the police command gets called,” Nick Mitchell, an attorney who serves as Denver’s lead independent monitor, told me. “We have access to all of the files and materials and interviews of internal affairs. We can walk in there and pick up any investigation.”
There are eighteen thousand police departments in the United States, but only a hundred and sixty-six of them, or less than one per cent, have oversight agencies. Among the few such agencies that exist, only twenty per cent can conduct independent investigations of police conduct, and even fewer can do so immediately after the incident. Indiana University researchers studying the impact of civilian oversight found that the presence of a monitor with investigative powers reduces racial disparities in police homicides of citizens by six per cent per year. Nationally, over the last five years, unarmed blacks were four times as likely to be shot and killed by police as unarmed whites.
Crutcher imagined how such a monitor might have changed the outcome of the Shelby investigation. Shelby was not interviewed until three days after the shooting, and was advised by a superior not to speak to investigators until she retained a lawyer. She was allowed to view a video of the shooting before being interviewed by police. Such actions would have been discouraged in Denver, according to Mitchell. “It’s not ideal,” he told me, of the sequence of events in that investigation. “I want people’s native recollections of what they remember unaltered by extraneous information.”
Bynum, Tulsa’s mayor, has been receptive to police reform. The forty-two-year-old conservative leader has styled himself as a policy wonk who’s too data-driven to play politics—in 2017, he gave a TED talk entitled “A Republican Mayor’s Plan to Replace Partisanship with Policy.” Two weeks after taking office, in 2016, Bynum established the Tulsa Commission on Community Policing, comprising city-council members, police officials, and local residents. The commission issued seventy-seven recommendations to improve policing in the city, such as instituting a crisis-intervention team to deal with mentally ill residents and requiring implicit bias training for all officers. Establishing an agency to investigate police wasn’t among the recommendations. In January of 2019, Bynum and his staff visited Denver’s office of the independent monitor to learn more about implementation strategies and speak to staffers, community activists, and the local police chief. Later that month, Bynum announced that Tulsa would have its own independent monitor, though the precise investigative powers of Tulsa’s version were not disclosed.
Within days, the Tulsa Fraternal Order of Police, the city’s police union, issued a letter to Bynum threatening to sue the city if an independent monitor were established without first negotiating with them. Such tactics are common among police unions opposed to outside oversight. “It’s not what the community’s asking for. It’s what you can negotiate with these unions, which put a lot of restrictions on it,” Susan Hutson, the president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, told me. “Access to data, access to their officers, all the things that make oversight independent.”
Months passed as the city searched for a solution that would satisfy community leaders and not invite legal action from the police union. When details of the monitor’s role finally emerged, as a city-council ordinance, in the summer of 2019, the office was not as independent as Tiffany Crutcher and other activists had hoped. Instead of being an investigator, like Mitchell, Denver’s lead monitor, who could roam a crime scene, question police, and launch investigations at the public’s behest, the Tulsa monitor would act more like an auditor, reviewing internal-affairs investigations after the fact and offering policy recommendations. The mayor later said that he hoped to increase the monitor’s power through collective bargaining with the police union. Crutcher called the proposed new post toothless. “It was watered down, it didn’t have any power, and it wouldn’t prevent what happened to Terence from happening again,” she said. She and other activists pulled their support for the bill and convinced some city-council members to, as well, forcing the mayor to withdraw it.
In March of this year, city leaders tried a different tack, with the councillor Vanessa Hall-Harper proposing an ordinance that would put the establishment of a monitor up to a public vote in August. While the measure initially had the support of a majority of the council, most members ended up voting against it, citing opposition from their constituents. “To have a punitive or corrective authority that manages something that they don’t fully understand, I think, is dangerous,” the councillor Ben Kimbro told the Tulsa World. Behind the scenes, the Fraternal Order of Police mobilized Tulsa residents to send thousands of e-mails and make phone calls to city-council members—and even to show up at their houses—in opposition to the measure, the union chairman, Jerad Lindsey, said on a recent podcast.
Three and a half years after Terence Crutcher’s death, Tulsa’s police department continued to police itself. And while the fight for change had come to consume Tiffany’s life—she moved from Montgomery, Alabama, back to Tulsa, to pursue activism full-time, in December of 2018—for most Tulsans, it played out quietly, in newspaper articles that they didn’t read and city-council meetings they didn’t attend. Among those who did engage, contention over what to do about police seemed to be growing, rather than reaching a consensus, in a city that is seventy per cent white, thirteen per cent Hispanic, and ten per cent African-American. Even in one of the reddest states in America, though, the death of George Floyd would change all of that. “People automatically assume that all police officers are good, maybe the victim did something wrong,” Crutcher told me. “They toil, they go back and forth between what’s right and what’s wrong and what was or what wasn’t. But, this time, I think the light bulb finally came on.”
Crutcher was quiet as the Tulsa protest began, on May 30th. An unexpectedly large crowd of several hundred had convened in Brookside, a posh leisure district filled with upscale restaurants and boutiques, south of downtown Tulsa. Protesters were initially contained to the sidewalks, but they eventually streamed out onto the streets and staged a “die-in” in front of an Urban Outfitters store. They chanted Terence Crutcher’s name as police peered down from the roof of a popular sports bar. Crutcher paced among the bodies splayed out on the sweltering asphalt, recording everything with her phone for Facebook Live. She spoke only briefly at the start of the march, asking the crowd to acknowledge Terence’s three daughters, who were accompanying her and wearing “#Justice 4 Crutch” T-shirts. Then she directed everyone to start marching.
The crowd was energized, rapidly growing, and surprisingly white. People brandished signs bearing the jolts of moral clarity that have suddenly, strangely, been accepted by a wide audience: “Black Lives Matter,” “White Silence Is Violence,” “Terence Crutcher Should Be Alive!” Many people told me that they were attending their first-ever protest. A twenty-year-old black Tulsa native named Josiah, who declined to give his last name, pointed down the road, toward a neighborhood in midtown Tulsa, where he grew up. He said that when he was sixteen, while he was out jogging there, police officers stopped him and wanted to know where he lived. “It has been Ahmaud Arbery. It has been Eric Garner. It has been George Floyd,” Josiah said. “It could be you, it could be me.”
Farther ahead in the procession, Greg Robinson, the organizer and Terence Crutcher Foundation board member, wielded a bullhorn like a drum major’s mace. As protesters staged another die-in, at an intersection next to a QuikTrip gas station, Robinson turned from chanting to orating. “Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and the Crutcher family has done everything they could for this city! They’ve talked to the mayor! They’ve researched for the mayor! They’ve sung for the mayor! They’ve laid Terence Crutcher’s bloody clothes down at City Hall for the mayor! And what were they asking for?”
The crowd roared back, “Justice!”
“And yet justice has still not been served.”
With the crowd quiet and forming a natural circle around the die-in, Robinson continued: “We have four simple demands.” He listed them, one by one. They wanted an independent monitor, which Tiffany Crutcher and a cadre of community leaders had first called for in 2018. They wanted some of the city budget to be divested from the Tulsa Police Department and invested in mental-health services. They wanted the city to settle pending litigation with the Crutcher family, which filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Tulsa in 2018. And they wanted the mayor to cancel the city’s contract with “Live PD,” a “Cops”-like reality show on A&E, which shadows police officers performing arrests and has been decried as racist by critics.
Robinson worked on the Presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton before returning to Tulsa, after Terence Crutcher was killed. He told me that he learned that politics and community organizing were two sides of the same coin. In both cases, he has to gather people around a common cause, channel their emotion into action, and provide clear steps toward enacting change. “Both are motivated a lot of times by a hopeful anger,” Robinson told me later. “Anybody can get somebody to protest, but it’s going from the protest to the policy side that requires the strategy and the organization.”
As the demonstration swelled to more than a thousand people, Crutcher noticed that police had successfully guessed the route of the march and diverted traffic as the protesters walked. They were, in essence, serving as escorts. She thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Albany Movement, of the early nineteen-sixties, in which an effort to gain attention for the black struggle for desegregation in Georgia was thwarted because the town of Albany’s police chief savvily chose not to brutalize black protesters while cameras were present. “Let’s take the highway,” she said, on her live stream. “We need the mayor to hear us.”
Protesters streamed onto the exit ramp of Interstate 44, darting between idling vehicles and scrambling over a concrete overpass. One protester was injured as a truck accelerated along the left-shoulder lane and struck him. But soon enough protesters had overtaken both sides of the highway. It would remain closed for at least half an hour. Standing near the interstate median, Robinson repeated the group’s demands on his bullhorn as Crutcher circled him with her phone, continuing to broadcast the demonstration live. “It’s not what you say, it’s what you keep saying,” Crutcher told me later. “People who are influencers could go back when they left the protest to their centers of influence, to their churches, to their friends, to their families, to their kitchen tables, to discuss these demands and figure out if it makes sense to them and their respective communities.”
Later, the protesters marched toward the mayor’s house, with hundreds chanting “Black Lives Matter!” as they passed leafy mansions tucked behind stone walls. Under the direction of police, Bynum, along with his wife and children, had left his house when he found out marchers were headed in their direction. In a Facebook post that Saturday night, he wrote, “Change occurs in Tulsa through collaboration, deliberation and thoughtful action - not through attempts at intimidation.” (Bynum did not respond to a request for an interview.)
The Saturday march, unlike many that unfolded around the country that weekend, did not end with aggression by police, or looting, or vandalism. It ended with Crutcher standing before the crowd back at Brookside, her voice louder than it had been in any public setting since George Floyd’s death. “I need y’all to do just one more chant for me. Just one more chant for the ancestors.”
The call and response was deafening.
“Justice for Greenwood!”
“Justice for Crutch!”
“Reparations Now!”
If Tulsa seemed slow to react to Floyd’s death initially, everything lurched into fast-forward after the Saturday protest. An even larger demonstration on Sunday attracted a young, lively crowd, though it ended with police firing pepper-spray balls on protesters who refused to leave the darkened streets. The following Monday, the mayor agreed to meet with Crutcher and other activists in an impromptu gathering at City Hall. Part candid discussion, part strategic negotiation, the meeting ended with Bynum agreeing to back another city-council push for an independent monitor, enter into collective bargaining with the police union to strengthen the monitor’s role, and engage in arbitration with the union if it refused to accept civilian oversight. He also agreed to end the city’s contract with the television show “Live PD.” For Crutcher and Robinson, who led the negotiations, it was a breakthrough that proved protesting worked, but so did dialogue. “What happened today—work, three hours sitting in a room, two sides, coming together to find a middle ground to move our city forward—is what this is about,” Robinson said as he stood next to Bynum and Crutcher.
When I met with Crutcher three days later, in a park dedicated to victims of the 1921 massacre, she seemed cautiously optimistic about the prospects of coöperating with the mayor. Already, the police union had come out against the independent-monitor idea again, and the “Live PD” cancellation had caused a backlash in conservative circles. “Getting some agreements established, those are small victories,” she said, wearing a salmon-colored sweatshirt that said “Support Black Colleges.” “But that’s just the battle. We haven’t won the war just yet.”
Her optimism was short-lived. The following Sunday, Crutcher found herself once again defending her brother on national television. In a “CBS Morning News” segment on Tulsa’s history of racial violence, Mayor Bynum said he didn’t believe that Betty Shelby’s killing of Terence Crutcher had anything to do with the fact that Terence was black. “It is more about the really insidious nature of drug utilization than it is about race,” the mayor said. Crutcher was also interviewed for the segment, but she focussed on policy. “The use-of-force standard has to be changed,” she said. “Then, he could then finally rest in peace.”
Later, Crutcher told me that the mayor’s comments—especially coming after the progress that had been made in their Monday meeting—felt like one of the toughest setbacks she had experienced in her three years as a police-reform advocate. She has always been in a delicate dance with the city, advocating for broad policy reforms even as she seeks a very personal legal remedy. But she sees the two causes as linked, and the outpouring of local frustration with the mayor’s comments indicated that many Tulsans did, too. “I feel like he ripped the Band-Aid off and my community is bleeding yet again,” Crutcher said. On June 10th, Bynum walked back his comments in another Facebook post, calling them dumb and simplistic. “I did an interview over the weekend that hurt a lot of good people and has caused a lot of my allies in our work to address racial disparity to question my real commitment,” he wrote. “I’m sorry for letting people down in a critical moment.”
Days later, the actions of three Tulsa police officers reignited tensions. On June 8th, Travis Yates, a major in the Tulsa Police Department, said, on a local conservative radio show, “We’re shooting African-Americans about twenty-four per cent less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed,” citing specious research. The major’s comments sparked condemnation from the mayor and the Black Officers Coalition. That same day, Tulsa Police released body-cam footage of two officers accosting a pair of black teen-agers and forcing them to the ground, ostensibly for jaywalking. That encounter is under internal investigation. Since Tulsa still has no independent monitor, the exact nature of the investigation will remain opaque.
On June 10th, President Donald Trump announced that he would be holding his first rally since March in Tulsa, on Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the date in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom. (He later moved the date of the rally back a day, to June 20th.) Though Tulsa’s large annual Juneteenth celebration had been cancelled, due to coronavirus concerns, leaders in the black community quickly revived it and are now planning an “I, Too, Am America” rally, in the heart of Black Wall Street. The Terence Crutcher Foundation is among the event’s sponsors. “We don’t want him in our city, and we’re not honored to have him,” Crutcher said in an interview on MSNBC. The Trump rally marks yet another contrast between Crutcher and Mayor Bynum, who wrote on Facebook, “In Tulsa, we protect the free and peaceful exchange of ideas. We did it during the last two weeks of protests, and we will do it during the President’s visit to Tulsa next week.”
By the time Trump announced his intentions, Crutcher and Robinson had already decided to take political matters in the city into their own hands. After a long and anxious few days spent trying to determine the appropriate way to respond to all that had happened in Tulsa since George Floyd was killed—really, since Terence Crutcher was killed—they met at the Tulsa County Election Board, on the blustery morning of June 10th. Robinson had exchanged his “Legalize Being Black” T-shirt for a charcoal suit. Crutcher wielded a fifty-dollar check, made out to the city of Tulsa, rather than a bullhorn. The pair announced that Robinson would be running for mayor, and Crutcher would be his senior campaign adviser.
At age thirty, Robinson could be the youngest mayor in Tulsa’s history, and the first black one. “I have to tell you that I’m scared,” he said, at the start of his speech announcing his candidacy. “I’m scared to stand up and say this is what the time has called for, and that I’m the person that’s called for it. But what I’m more scared of is continuing to live in a city where we’re not doing right by all of the citizens of Tulsa.” Crutcher rubbed Robinson’s shoulder as he spoke.
The decision to run for mayor had come at the last minute. Even that morning, the two had exchanged text messages questioning whether to go through with it. But Robinson tried to put the moment in context for the small gaggle of reporters who had gathered. He said that he was a soldier in a fight bigger than himself. “It’s not about me,” he said. “The time has passed to be of the opinion that government cannot function for us. We are citizens, too. All of us are citizens of Tulsa. And all of us have the right to participate.”
Crutcher nodded in quiet agreement. If Robinson hadn’t been able or willing to run, she would have run herself. “This is really a form of protest for us,” she told me.
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests
- The death of George Floyd, in context.
- The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
- Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest?
- A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
- The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments, and what comes next.
- The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
