When Oklahoma Highway Patrol began sweeping Tulsa-area homeless encampments and carting off people's belongings in September, Oklahoma's governor Kevin Stitt posted gleeful videos of bulldozers, dump trucks and flashing lights. You know, big boy stuff.
As much as this impressed the bots cheering Stitt in his Twitter comments, the response has been less unanimous than our governor might have anticipated. Sure it all seemed cruel and ill-informed, but what were the real-world results? A little over a month later, the verdict is clear: not only were these executive actions callous and disruptive, they were also expensive and ineffective, as measured against state officials' own declared (albeit shifting) goals.
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Thanks to unsolicited state involvement—at a cost of over half a million taxpayer dollars—we’re no closer to addressing the problems associated with the lived experience of homelessness in Tulsa. And if you ask local service providers, they’ll tell you that the governor’s sweeps set us back even further.
Last week representatives from several Tulsa service providers met to discuss the impact of Operation SAFE. Collectively, their organizations provide hundreds of thousands of client contacts annually and have 172 years of experience addressing homelessness and housing insecurity in Tulsa.
“While aimed at restoring order, [Operation SAFE] sparked debate about whether such top-down measures truly resolve root causes or simply displace those in need,” said Josh Sanders of the Tulsa Day Center during the meeting’s opening remarks.
Each representative cited specific ways the state set back their own organization's work, either by disrupting contact with clients who receive services, short-circuiting pathways to permanent housing, or eroding trust with unhoused individuals.
That trust will be difficult to restore. “Sweeps disrupt lives by causing the loss of personal belongings,” said Steven Whitaker, president and CEO of John 3:16 Mission. Lost in loads trucked to landfills were birth certificates, cash savings and other forms of identification, all critical assets for anybody trying to get a job or housing.