DA: Tulsa police protect the public

America is experiencing a wave of unrest, rioting and protests with symbols of America’s history being prime targets of hate speech and destruction.

“I can’t say this is unexpected,” Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said  on Tulsa Beacon Weekend on KCFO AM970 radio. “This script has been written for decades. We all knew that these days were going to be coming. I think we were just blindly ignorant and choosing not to pay attention to some of the warning signs.”

Anarchists  have vandalized, toppled and destroyed statues of President George Washington; President Thomas Jefferson; President Abraham Lincoln; President Teddy Roosevelt; President Ulyssess S. Grant; Explorer Christopher Columbus; Gen. Casimir Pulaski (a confederate general); Robert Gould Shaw (who fought in the Civil War); the Armenian genocide monument in Denver; Salt Lake City’s Serve and Protect bronze sculpture; the Soldiers and Sailors monument in Cleveland; the World War I Memorial in Birmingham, Alabama; the Mahatma Gandi statue in Washington, D.C.; the Polish war hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko and a host of Confederate statues. 

Leftist activist Shaun King said the next step would be destruction or defacement of statues of Jesus Christ, which he calls a form of “white supremacy.” He would target murals and stained glass windows, too.

“Egocentrism is kind of a concept that your generation is so much more knowledgeable than any other pre-existing generation,” Kunzweiler said. “Apparently, because of your enlightenment, you are so much farther ahead in thinking that past generations except for the fact that you are not in those times and you are not experiencing what those people had to experience.

“This idea that somehow you need to erase your past – to me, this is not the district attorney talking, it’s Steve Kunzweiler the Catholic or Christian talking – when you start abandoning what your past is, you are denying yourself as well as everything you ancestors lived through.”

An inspection of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, would show contradictions to current political correctness, he said. David and Moses both murdered men but that doesn’t nullify the good they did.

“That’s why you have those stories in the Bible,” Kunzweiler said. “That past is important to know what the human condition is about so that you can continue to have conversations about it. Meaningful conversations. When you wipe out a history, all you have is what’s staring you in the face and those are the people who are looking for power. That’s the way I look at this.

“(Anarchist) want to vilify anyone one who thinks differently than they do.”

Communities have to have a guardian to survive and thrive, Kunzweiler said. If you don’t, your community will “evaporate very quickly.”

“Threats both internal and external will take over,” Kunzweiler said. “It’s vital to recognize the central role that law enforcement plays in protecting law and order and protecting community.”

The movement to “defund the police” is demoralizing, Kunzweiler said.

“Law enforcement is sons and daughters, husbands and wives, children and parents,” Kunzweiler said. “And every day they put that uniform on, knowing full well that they may not be able to come back home because they had to protect some other citizen who was being assaulted or attacked.

“They put their lives on the line every day for our community. In their heart, they want to do the right thing.”

When President Trump brought his campaign rally to Tulsa on June 20, the liberal news media predicted violent protests that never materialized. In fact, police only made six arrests during the rally and law enforcement had complete control of the situation.

“I think there are two factors that played into that,” Kunzweiler said. “One is, it’s Tulsa. There is just a completely different feel about this community compared to a lot of other places I’ve been to around the country coming down from St. Louis.

“That’s part of the reason I went to law school here and after law school, I chose to live here just because the community is a lot more interdependent and I think we see things a little differently. I wouldn’t say that it helps but having that race riot or race massacre, whatever you want to call it – we’ve got some perspective there about issues.

“But in addition to that, the coordination of leaders, especially within law enforcement, in anticipation of potential violent circumstances, did a lot of outreach in the community and anticipated a lot of different things that people didn’t know that was going on behind the scenes that certainly were worrisome. They had done an excellent job in kind of cutting down the potential.”

Law enforcement found stashes of items that could have been used as projectiles in rioting hidden in empty buildings Downtown. There were some Styrofoam cups filled with hardened concrete that were disguised as garbage.

“They were able to intercept a lot of potential havoc,” Kunzweiler said. “There were obviously people coming from outside this area that had plans to take advantage of it and we pre-emptively addressed that.”

Nationally, people don’t appreciate how much effort goes into protecting from threats that no one even knows about, he said.

Kunzweiler said his office reviewing the cases of six people charged with obstruction that Saturday. He said there was great cooperation between federal and local law enforcement.

“The Secret Service’s job is to make sure that the leader of the Free World is protected wherever he’s going to go,” Kunzweiler said. “The obviously had to have some concentric rings around (the airport) to take care of whatever issues you might have.

“But beyond that, you have the day-to-day operations. Plenty of people were paying attention. If Downtown Tulsa were going to be occupied by an awful lot of law enforcement, I’m confident there were some folks who thought they might get away with crimes. So you had to have coordination to do some of the day-to-day operations.

“We didn’t have nearly the problems that some folks were predicting.”

Kunzweiler said he had never seen so many unmarked police cars in one place as law enforcement tried to stay away from being overbearing.

Kunzweiler agreed with Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado to recommend ending the contract with ICE to hold prisoners in the county jail because of the slowdown in illegal immigration.

“We had a crisis going on in this country,” Kunzweiler said. “We had efforts to have mass illegal immigration across our southern border and it was kind of an ‘all hands on deck’ dynamic. That issue has since been resolved thanks to the President’s policies to try to stem that flow.”

Housing the ICE prisoners was a temporary measure and there is no necessity to continue that contract, Kunzweiler said.

“Sheriff Regalado has run the premier jail in the country when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Kunzweiler said.

There has not be a confirmed case of the coronavirus in Tulsa’s jail. Tulsa was proactive in establishing CDC guidelines. If someone gets arrested, they will be isolated for 14 days before they enter the general population.

“They were able to prevent the outbreaks that happened across the country,” Kunzweiler said.

Kunzweiler said his office never stopped working in the wake of the coronavirus, although some of his staff began working from home. Prosecutors still filed charges.

“Crime didn’t go away,” Kunzweiler said. “People still continued to commit crimes. Now we are starting to bring people back into the courtroom and have contested preliminary hearings.”

The Oklahoma Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals has delayed all jury trials until August.

“We are trying to see what that’s going to look like in August,” Kunzweiler said.

Some issues includes how to handle clusters of jurors and how they will be seated in a courtroom.  Kunzweiler has advocated for a new county courthouse.

“This courthouse has exceeded its warranty,” Kunzweiler said. “It was built back in the time when our population was significantly less than what it is now.

“We are getting into the area of 700,000 people. It’s a nine-story building and it’s just not built for modern-day court work.  At some point, I hate to say it, the Tulsa County citizens are really going to have to figure out what a more modern courthouse facility looks like for the safety of the people who work there as well as the public who are invited.”