State Public Safety Commissioner Tim Timpton says the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has been spread thin for years. He says now is the time to shift OHP resources to areas of greater need.
Tipton told reporters the transition of the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol's troopers out of the state's major metro areas is a long-time coming in a press conference Thursday.
"Why now? This has been a public safety issue that needed to be addressed," Tipton said. "And I believe it's reached critical mass where we're not providing that public safety footprint outside these metro areas."
The idea, Tipton said, is to ensure the state has troopers patrolling its major roadways 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. That should mean, he said, a greater capacity to address higher-than-ever service call volumes and assist local cops in all the same ways they do now. Especially in rural areas.
The move comes as the highway patrol constructs three new legislature-funded troop headquarters in Tulsa, Clinton and Ardmore, and one new tactical training facility outside of Wellston. Also crucial to the timing, Tipton said, is a cadet class of about 50 new troopers getting ready to graduate in October.
"And I think we've got 52 cadets upstairs right now," he said. "When you apply for the highway patrol, you know that out of the academy…we're going to deploy you where we need you to go."
The new recruits are essential to implement the new plan, Tipton said, as coverage areas shift.
What the resource realignment will look like this fall
The Oklahoma State Highway Patrol is broken up into 13 troops, labeled A through M. Each troop is assigned to patrol a different multi-county state area. The realignment, Tipton said, will simply rearrange the same number of covered patrol areas to allow for continuous patrols as troopers change shifts.
"Right now, today, and it's been this way for several years, if you leave the Oklahoma City or Tulsa area after 11 p.m., 12:00 at night, there's not a trooper out working on I-35, I-40," Tipton said." They're at home. They've worked their 8 or 10-hour shift, whatever schedule they're on. They now get put on call."
That means for a time, while the next trooper is starting their shift, there is a lull in active patrolling and response times, particularly on major corridors running from the metro areas to the state's borders.
"The number of callouts has increased year over year," he said. "Troopers very rarely don't get called out in the middle of the night, and a majority of those calls are for the interstate system. If you've driven lately from Oklahoma City to Dallas on I-35, it's a lot more travelers coming through our state."
When Commissioner Tipton's office first announced the resource shift to reporters last week, local police chiefs in the Oklahoma City metro area said they had concerns about having to pick up any slack left by less OHP activity in their areas.
Sen. Mark Mann, D-Oklahoma City, backed them up by requesting a state attorney general's opinion on the matter, seeking clarity on whether the public safety department can make this move all on its own.
"Our local police departments are already overburdened and under-resourced," Mann said in a July 9 press release. "Shifting the responsibility of responding to incidents and accidents on interstate highways to local agencies will only exacerbate the serious challenges they already face."And hours after Tipton's press conference, Tulsa's Police Department released a statement in response on Facebook.
"Tulsa Police is currently understaffed by 137 officers, leaving no capacity to divert resources to highway safety without compromising regular calls for service," the post reads. "Officers lack the training required to investigate complex collisions involving large-scale vehicles and heavy-duty trucks (over 26,000 lbs.), such as semis and dump trucks. Currently, State Troopers receive specialized training to handle these situations."Tipton said the problem of being understaffed and underresourced is one his agency shares with its local partners, but just because troopers will be distributed differently throughout the state, doesn't mean they won't be responding to assist calls in major metros.
"We'll always respond to calls for assistance…whether it's a call for assistance because they need an additional law enforcement officer there, or the incident is something that they're not trained to respond to, he said. "We'll respond to it…It'll just allow us to have our troopers out in those more rural areas of the interstate."
The resource shortage is something Tipton has brought up to the legislature during interim studies and legislative expert testimonies. The alternative to the shift in the OHP's focus is inconsistent with the priorities of the state's top elected officials, he said.
"I've been commissioner almost four years now, and I know my predecessors over the years, we've had studies out there that say to continue the mission in all the areas that we cover we need about 1,100 troopers," Tipton said.
If adding that kind of capacity to the OHP, an agency of about 734 total commissioned officers, is one that needs to be made, he said, then the next question becomes:
"How big do you want to grow state government?" He said.
