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Facts and Findings Concerning Community Policing: A Chat with Former Tulsa Police Chief Drew Diamond

Police violence, police shootings, and police brutality -- and acts of murder or terror committed against the police themselves -- have been on the rise in America in ways that are deeply and pervasively troubling -- not to mention downright scary. In the wake of tragedies in Ferguson, Baltimore, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere -- and given the ever-increasing digital-video documentation made possible by smartphones and tablets -- it's clear that matters of police work nationwide are becoming more and more connected with matters of race, class, ethnicity, society, and politics -- as well as, while we're at it, issues of gun control. What, then, is "community policing"? What exactly is meant by this term? How does it work? And where (and why) has it been successfully employed as a method of law enforcement? Our guest on ST today has long been an advocate for community policing -- indeed, he remains a nationally recognized expert on this topic (and has thus written articles and books about it): Former Tulsa Police Chief Drew Diamond left the TPD in 1991 and has been the Executive Director of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa since 2011. As Diamond explains, proponents of community policing say that this method of police work reliably decreases the tensions that can flare up between police officers and the neighborhoods they serve.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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