Originally built to withstand explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenade attacks, the armored vehicle was now patrolling an American city, where peaceful protests against police brutality were being staged. 

“It is strictly a defensive vehicle that our swat team members can use to … protect them from gunfire,” said Canadian County Sheriff Chris West, whose department operates two mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, one of which was brought to the Oklahoma County jail during protests this summer. 

The Canadian County Sheriff’s Office has two of 27 mine-resistant vehicles in Oklahoma that have been obtained through a federal program that funnels used military equipment to local law enforcement agencies. 

But while these vehicles provide protection from gunfire and explosives, along with providing law enforcement with an intimidating display of force, they are just as often used for parades and community events, according to records obtained by The Frontier. 

Since 2014, the Canadian County Sheriff’s Office has used its two mine resistant vehicles a combined 106 times, according to usage logs obtained by The Frontier through an open records request. 

Forty-four percent of its use was for an official action, such as a “warrant service” or “tac team call out,” according to a usage log. 

The rest of the time the vehicles were used at a public event, such as a parade, conducting a training exercise or out of repair. 

On May 31, the day of a peaceful protest against police brutality that included a march from the state Capitol to downtown Oklahoma City, the usage log for Canadian County’s mine-resistant vehicles listed “riots” as the nature of the response.  

The Bixby Police Department, which serves a city of 27,000, received a mine-resistant vehicle through the federal program in 2014. Since then, it has used it to respond to seven official calls, such as serving a “high risk warrant,” according to travel logs. 

Above is a list of all military equipment received by Oklahoma law enforcement agencies through the 1033 program.

Twenty times it was used for a community event, including the Bixby Christmas Parade. 

Bixby Police Chief Andy Choate told The Frontier he believed getting a chance to use the vehicle at community events is a great way to interact with the public.

“I see it as a positive,” Choate said.

In Bartlesville, the police department used its vehicle 22 times since 2014, according to the department’s deployment log. 

On July 16, 2014, it was used to execute a search warrant for a suspect believed to have explosives and “armed posted guards,” according to the travel log. 

On Oct. 9, 2018, the vehicle was also used to transport police officers to a firing range that required driving across a flooded bridge. 

Two-thirds of the time the vehicle was used for community events, including an Easter egg hunt at the park. 

However, most law enforcement agencies with a mine resistant vehicle told The Frontier they do not keep usage logs, once a requirement that President Donald Trump ended in 2017. 

In Warr Acres, a city of 10,301 residents, Police Chief R.L. Patty said his department doesn’t keep usage logs, but told The Frontier it has been used three times since it was received in 2018, which includes two times this summer in response to protests in Oklahoma City.

Referred to as the LESO or 1033 program, the Department of Defense transfers excess federal property to state and local law enforcement agencies. 

Since 2010, Oklahoma agencies have received more than $27.3 million worth of equipment, including firearms, trucks, aircraft and body armor. 

The value of mine-resistant vehicles distributed to Oklahoma agencies is more than $20 million, according to federal records. 

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, who has been active in increasing law enforcement access to the LESO program, called it a “no brainer.” 

“It’s stuff that otherwise is going to go to West Africa or someplace else, and we don’t want that to happen when we have the need right here in Oklahoma,” Inhofe said.

The use of military equipment by local police has received increased attention in recent years as police respond to protests and demonstrations across the country.

“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like there’s an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them,” President Barack Obama said during a 2015 speech.

Following protests the previous year in Ferguson, Missouri, the Obama administration set restrictions on the use of some military equipment, including grenade launchers and bayonets.

But Trump has removed those restrictions.

“These restrictions went too far,” said Jeff Sessions, Trump’s former attorney general, announcing the reversal to a crowd of police officers in 2017. “We will not put superficial concerns above public safety.”

The post Mine resistant vehicles more parade float than an enforcement tool appeared first on The Frontier.

The Capital Bikeshare program in Washington, D.C., has 3,700 bikes and 440 stations, including this one near Union Station. KEVIN CANFIELD/The Frontier

I went to the nation’s capital last week and rented a red bike with three gears, sleek black fenders and a bell I never put to use.

Boy, was it fun.

I cruised up and down the National Mall, from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.

Then I pedaled along the Tidal Basin to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and continued the loop to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. memorials.

That was a blast, too.

Tulsa will never top Washington, D.C., when it comes to historic landmarks. But any day now it’s supposed to have a bike-share program like the one I used to get around D.C. So when I got back to work Monday I tracked down Daniel Sperle, Tulsa Bike Share’s executive director, to get an update on the program.

First let me backpedal a bit. It’s not fair to compare the bike-share program I used in Washington to Tulsa Bike Share. According to Capital Bikeshare’s website, the District of Columbia was the first jurisdiction in the United States to start a bike-share system. That was in 2008. SmartBike DC, as the company was known then, had 120 bikes and 10 stations.

Now it’s massive, serving the entire D.C. metro area and parts of Maryland and Virginia with a network of 3,700 bikes and 440 stations, according to the Capital Bikeshare website.

So, no, this is not a comparison of the two programs. But the ease and convenience with which I was able to get around Washington using Capital Bikeshare made me think how cool it would be to have a bikeshare program in Tulsa.

Phase 1 of Tulsa Bike Share was supposed to launch in the spring. The starting date has been pushed back to the fall to allow time for the bikes to be built, Sperle said, though the system’s branding campaign and website will be rolled out in early July, along with a projected launch date.

“We are currently developing a new name and visual identity for the bike-sharing system,” Sperle said. “We are excited to be developing a unique brand that is representative of Tulsa and the innovative nature of bike-sharing within multimodal transit networks.”

Tulsa Bike Share officials initially planned to begin Phase 1 of operations with 108 bikes and 12 stations within the Inner Dispersal Loop. Those numbers have been increased to 140 and 18, respectively, to improve accessibility and increase ridership capacity.

“The biggest thing is that the equipment we selected actually allows for us to have slightly lower capital costs, so we were able to purchase more bikes and more stations with the money that we already had,” Sperle said.

Daniel Sperle

Phase 2, which could be implemented as early as the fall of 2018, will extend service beyond the IDL and double the number of bikes and bike stations, Sperle said. The University of Tulsa, Cherry Street and Peoria Avenue will each get bike stations in Phase 2.

As will A Gathering Place for Tulsa park.

“We are doing an evaluation right now to determine the number of bike-share stations that would be located on the perimeter of the park,” said Jeff Stava, executive director and trustee of Tulsa’s Gathering Place LLC. “We believe that the park will be a central place within the city along the banks of the river just south of downtown and will be a natural part of the bike-share network as it begins.”

What Tulsa Bike Share officials are not sharing yet are details of how the program will work. What kind of bikes will people ride? What will it cost? And what will the newly branded program be called?

Sperle said that will all be made public next month.

“We are going to do a press release which will announce the vendor that we selected (and) the type of equipment,” he said. “We have all of the locations for stations already decided, and then the biggest thing is just going to be the bikes.”

This map provided by Tulsa Bike Share shows the locations of the 18 bike stations that will be included in Phase 1 of the bike-share system. Click on map to enlarge image.

Capital Bikeshare, for example, promotes itself as a commuter service. I swiped my credit card into a kiosk at a bike station and paid $8 for 24 hours of service. With one catch: If I did not return my bike to a bike station within 30 minutes, I was charged an additional fee.

The idea is to move people short distances as cheaply and conveniently as possible. And it works in D.C. because Capital Bikeshare has so many stations. It’s no problem jumping on a bike a block from Union Station and zipping to a bike station 100 feet from the Lincoln Memorial.

Tulsa Bike Share will address the needs of people traveling short distances, Sperle said, but will also accommodate those people looking to take a longer, more leisurely ride.

“I think a large portion of what people are going to see in Tulsa as far as how they use it is going to be something that they are supplementing the trips made by car within the downtown area,” Sperle said. “So you are going to see people use it to move from one entertainment district to another, run an errand on their lunch rather than using the car or maybe walking a distance they would have originally.

“But, within our pricing structure we will also utilize a similar pricing structure to D.C. to encourage short trips.”

Tulsa has been working to put a bike-share program together since 2014, when the Bike-Share Advisory Committee was created. Tulsa Bike Share was formed in April 2016 as a not-for-profit under the 501(c)3 of Tulsa Tough. It is funded through a variety of sources, including federal grants, private donations, station sponsorships and ridership fees. As part of the Improve Our Tulsa sales tax program, Tulsans approved $250,000 in funding for capital costs.

Sperle has been waiting anxiously for months to unveil Tulsa’s bike-share program, and he says he’s confident Tulsans will like what they see.

I sure hope so. Maybe then I can grab a bike and get my picture taken in front of the Golden Driller.

Here is yours truly on my Capital Bikeshare bike last week in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Courtesy

The post Hyperlocal Blog: Pedaling past Lincoln and Jefferson with Tulsa’s bike-share program on my mind appeared first on The Frontier.

Anyone who has ever been within earshot of Jay will get that joke. He had a way with words that most of us will never approach, but he had his go-to phrases. In Jay’s world, there was no middle area, something was either the worst, or it was the best.

When I first started working at the Tulsa World, I was what’s known as a “night cops” reporter. My shift started at 3 p.m. and ended around midnight. What that meant was that by the time I walked into the office, most of the reporters were in deadline mode, trying to get their stories finished so they could head home.

The result was that I really didn’t know anyone. The only people I really talked to were night editors like Mary Bishop, Michael Dekker and Adam Daigle. This filled me with a very strong sense of “impostor syndrome.”

The Tulsa World was the only paper I ever wanted to work for, and I was in a newsroom every day with reporters I had read for years. But I didn’t know any of them, and they didn’t know me. So there were days I’d sit at my desk fearful that I wasn’t doing a good job and I was letting them down.

My desk was not far from Jay’s, and every day I would hear him cussing. He’d cuss at his email or cuss at his computer, or cuss about the Thunder or OU or OSU. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t cuss about.

For some reason, I felt compelled to jump into some sports debate he was having one day. I don’t remember what I said or what the argument was about, but I’m sure Jay disagreed with me.

But from that point on, he would stop by my desk every day to gripe about something, or ask what I thought about some television show or movie or sports contest. Sometimes I would say something to him and he’d reply “Oh, that’s GREAT! I’m going to put that in a column.”

And the next day, there it would be. Somehow, out of all the people at the Tulsa World that I now think of as friends, Jay was the first person to make me feel like I really belonged.

So it really sucks today to find out he’s gone. I think the last time I talked to him was during a random encounter at a Tulsa Drillers game. He asked how I was doing, said he thought The Frontier “was GREAT,” and walked away.

Jay was probably a nightmare for his editors, but to be his co-worker was something special. If you attend his funeral, just know that he’s somewhere watching it and complaining that it’s “THE WORST. FUNERAL. EVER.”

The post For a new reporter, Jay Cronley was a curmudgeonly godsend appeared first on The Frontier.

It’s possible that records an Oklahoma County district judge has ordered Gov. Mary Fallin to hand over may shed new light on the role Pruitt’s office played in the planned double execution of Lockett and inmate Charles Warner in 2014.

The judge’s order came earlier this week in a lawsuit I filed along with the Tulsa World seeking records that Fallin and the Department of Public Safety have refused to produce. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, always generous with credit for local journalists’ work, mentioned our lawsuit during a segment Thursday night about Pruitt. 

(A hearing on one aspect of the suit — Fallin’s efforts to search her personal email account — was set for Friday in District Judge Bryan Dixon’s court but may be rescheduled.)

Our attorneys have filed a motion to compel Fallin to abide by a Dec. 22 court order, which required someone with personal knowledge to attest to searching the governor’s personal email account for records that fall under our request. This became an issue when our initial request turned up emails from Fallin’s SBCglobal account.

Fallin’s general counsel, Jennifer Chance, filed a response stating she has complied with the order as she interprets it.

“Plaintiffs motion serves only to further harass Governor Fallin, create “news” stories, and Twitter opportunities for Plaintiffs by requiring responsive briefs and court hearings. In fact, during the December 9, 2016 hearing in this matter, Plaintiff Branstetter sat in the courtroom tweeting her interpretation of the parties’ arguments.”

I’m not sure why it would shock Chance or qualify as harassment if a journalist reports news about an open records lawsuit via social media.

We are, after all, in the business of distributing information and fighting for transparency. I can assure Chance there are far easier ways to find “Twitter opportunities” than spending two years suing the governor.

Dixon’s ruling this week was in some ways a win for Fallin’s office. He sided with the governor’s very expansive view of Oklahoma’s execution secrecy law, agreeing that the state can withhold information about a wide number of people who had some role in the execution.

For example, unless it’s overturned on appeal, Dixon’s order means the state will not have to release the name of whoever was on the phone to the prison that night from the governor’s mansion.

Fallin herself was attending a Thunder playoff game and we don’t know the person’s name who essentially assumed her role.

The secrecy law was initially pitched as a way to protect pharmacists from being harassed by activists allegedly bent on halting the death penalty through intimidation. To date, there have been no documented instances of such intimidation in Oklahoma.

Pruitt’s office cited one alleged incident in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court but it turned out that Pruitt was misleading the court, BuzzFeed has reported. 

The governor’s office still must turn over other documents that her attorneys claim are exempt or outside the scope of our request for Dixon’s review. Some of those records were released to The Frontier and other state media outlets Thursday.

There’s not much surprising in the 13 pages of new records and it’s not clear why they were even withheld.

They appear to be multiple copies of the same email from the attorney general’s office to another government official, whose name is redacted, asking: “Will you be the emergency contact person for these executions tomorrow?”

Whether the as-yet unreleased records reveal anything about Pruitt’s role in the execution, or any other newsworthy information, we have pursued this lawsuit for more than two years out of principle. The Oklahoma Open Records Act requires “prompt and reasonable” response.

Our lawsuit highlighted the practice Fallin’s office has of placing requests in a queue and then slow-playing them for months or even years, often prompting a lawsuit that costs the state. This practice was later adopted by Pruitt’s office, which was ordered to turn over thousands of emails related to his friends in the energy industry to the Center for Media and Democracy this week.

Fun fact: Attorney Robert Nelon, who filed that suit, is also one of several able attorneys who are representing us in our open records suit against Fallin and DPS. (Bob’s having a good run!)

Katie Townsend and Adam Marshall of the D.C.-based Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit devoted to transparency issues,  are also providing legal representation in our suit.

As Cary Aspinwall and I have previously reported, the warden who carried out Lockett’s execution believes it was Pruitt’s office who asked her to sign a false affidavit attesting to her knowledge of the drugs and other issues leading up to the April 29, 2014 execution.

In emails and statements to both of us while we worked for the World, Pruitt’s office repeatedly insisted DOC was solely responsible for the state’s lethal injection protocol. The protocol stated at the time that the OSP warden “will have sole discretion as to which lethal agent will be used for the scheduled execution.”

However, a former general counsel for the Department of Corrections told investigators: “The Attorney General’s Office, being an elective office, was under a lot of pressure. … I think it was a joint decision but there was, I got to say there was a definite push to make the decision, get it done, hurry up about it.”

Warden Anita Trammell, who was supposed to be in charge of choosing the lethal drugs, said it was Pruitt’s office and DOC general counsel Mike Oakley who came up with the revamped execution protocol used to execute Lockett. An affidavit that Trammell signed on the day of the execution said she would ensure DOC execution policies were followed.

“I signed the damn thing,” Trammell said during her interview with DPS. “I did not write that policy. I did not choose those drugs.”

Director Robert Patton confirmed in interviews with DPS that the lethal drugs were not chosen by Trammell: “The previous general counsel (Oakley) and the Attorney General’s Office” chose the drugs, he told investigators.

When supplies of Oklahoma’s usual execution drug ran short, the AG’s office and DOC’s general counsel cobbled together a new drug protocol, records show. They used online research such as “Wiki leaks or whatever it is” and testimony from an expert who testified in Florida whom they did not meet with, Oakley told investigators.

Despite having an inexperienced physician, a new drug of questionable effectiveness and the first double execution in modern times, DOC pushed forward that night, with Pruitt’s blessing.

As I and other media witnesses watched, Lockett rose up off the gurney and began speaking after he had been declared unconscious. A state investigation cited a failed IV as the key factor in Lockett’s 43-minute death.

The 10 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later deemed the execution “a procedural disaster” and the U.S. Supreme Court came within one vote of declaring Oklahoma’s process a violation of the 8th Amendment.

During the hearing, Justice Sonya Sotomayor told Oklahoma’s solicitor general she believed the AG’s office had been dishonest about expert opinions on the efficacy of the new drug, midazolam.

“Nothing you say or read to me am I going to believe frankly until I see it with my own eyes,” she said.

The post Execution records suit more than ‘Twitter opportunity’ appeared first on The Frontier.

A protester holds a sign outside the Tulsa County Courthouse last year following the announcement that Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby had been charged with first-degree manslaughter in the shooting of Terence Crutcher. DYLAN GOFORTH/The Frontier

I was watching the Oklahoma City Thunder game and messing around on Facebook last night when I saw a post made by a former co-worker. I realized pretty quickly that it was newly-released body-camera footage of an incident in Fort Worth, Texas, last month.

What happened that day is relatively well-known. But for the uninitiated, Jacqueline Craig, a 46-year-old black woman called police Dec. 21, 2016, to report that her white male neighbor had assaulted her 7-year-old son. Officer William Martin responded, and learned that the neighbor allegedly assaulted the child because he believed the child had littered.

From there, the interaction was broadcast to Facebook via the platform’s Facebook Live feature.

That video showed Craig telling Martin it didn’t matter if her child littered, because even if it had happened, that wouldn’t give the neighbor permission to touch her son.

“Why not?” Martin asked.

Craig appeared offended by the remark, and the conversation between her and Martin grew heated. Martin eventually threatened to arrest Craig, saying “if you keep yelling at me, you’re going to piss me off and I’m going to put you in jail.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Martin forcefully wrestled Craig to the ground and arrested her, as well as her 19-year-old daughter.

https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/824683365186072577

Fort Worth police later dropped the charges against the two women, and suspended Martin without pay during a review of the incident.

I watched that Facebook Live video exactly one time. Which is one time more than I watched the body-camera footage that was released by Craig’s attorneys on Thursday.

Why? When I saw the new recording had been released, I had zero interest in watching it. I’m always shocked and saddened at the inhumanity in some of these recordings, and this incident was no different. I’m fatigued by them. They’ve become the equivalent of sad dog commercials, my heartstrings have been tugged on so often that rather than watch I just change the channel.

So I scrolled past. But then I began to question myself. Is it wrong of me to do that? I’m extremely unlikely to ever face a similar situation, so by ignoring the video am I ignoring its reality? Am I ignoring the pain incidents like that cause and the people they hurt?

A story
When I was in college, I briefly waited tables at a restaurant in Muskogee, which is primarily a blue-collar town. Census data from 2015 list Muskogee as having about an 11 percent black population.

Because of the economic depression happening there, the tips we relied on as servers were always a crapshoot. And despite anecdotes about black people not tipping, it was a crapshoot that crossed boundaries of age and race.

One day I was standing by my empty section and a male co-worker strolled by. The conversation was about nothing important, so I can’t even remember what we started talking about. But I remember where it went. Suddenly, while complaining about a table he had, he dropped the n-word on me.

Jacqueline Craig, left, is seen on body-camera footage recorded by a Fort Worth Police Department Officer last month

It’s amazing how fast the human brain works. I quickly assessed that no one else was around, no one heard the slur but him and me. In my mind, that particular racial slur is the worst thing a person can say and I was shocked by how casually he used it.

He’s white, I’m white, and he assumed that he could not only say it around me but TO me. And he assumed I would not be offended by it.

And while I was offended by it, I chickened out. I said something unrelated and walked away.

And I was immediately ashamed of myself. I realized I’d made the decision to not confront him because no one was around to hear what he said. By not saying anything to him, I felt complicit in his racism, but since it was just between him and me, no one would be able to hold me responsible for his action, or my inaction.

So I consoled myself. Next time that happens, I said, I’ll say something.

Once again
Months later, I was in the kitchen when a female coworker burst in from the front of the restaurant. She was in tears, not just little wet eyes, she was heaving with sobs.

If you’ve never worked in a restaurant, it might surprise you to know how much female servers put up. Unwanted sexual advances from staff and customers are generally part of the routine. I put my arm around her and asked what happened.

She looked toward the restaurant floor and said “those (expletive) (slurs.)”

The entire kitchen paused. A large portion of the staff there was black. Generally speaking, everyone who worked there were friends with each other. Everyone was stunned into silence, and they all stared at her.

And they all stared at me.

I realized that by virtue of her saying that word to me, everyone expected me to respond. She later said the table had been continually rude and were now taking pleasure in making her run all over the restaurant, so much so that she couldn’t keep her other customers happy.

But there was no excuse for what she said. And there was no excuse for what I did next.

“Let me take the table for you,” I said. I’d cash them out and she wouldn’t have to see them again. It was altruistic and it was pitiful and weak.

Again I had been thrust into an act of racism and again I had stood by and done nothing.

Fort Worth video
So I watched the body-camera video and it was just what I feared. Once the officer threatens to arrest Craig, her daughter steps in front of her to get her out of the situation. Martin throws her to the ground and appears to continually escalate a situation where he turned a victim’s entire family into suspects.

What did I learn from watching it? I don’t know, exactly — I guess that despite whatever we want to believe there is still ugliness and oppression that refuses to go away.

But I’m not going to avoid videos like it anymore. Maybe it’s better for my mental health to ignore videos like that, but it’s not better for my humanity. I owe many people an apology for my past inaction, and it’s my resolution to never have to do that again.

The post My struggle with ‘white silence’ appeared first on The Frontier.

Late Saturday, we posted a story by Kassie McClung updating readers on a new version of a lawsuit that had been filed Dec. 16 against City Councilor Blake Ewing.

I asked her to write it after learning that Ewing’s business partners in The Max Retropub had filed a new version of their civil suit against him, which alleges he committed fraud in transferring more than $300,000 out of The Max to an entity he controls. The money went to fund his other businesses and for various personal expenses, according to the investors’ lawsuit.

The suit was filed by attorney Mark Perkins, who ran for mayor of Tulsa as an independent candidate in 2009. Several other investors joined the suit after it was filed.

The suit accuses Ewing of “massive acts of malfeasance and misappropriation” by using funds generated by The Max to pay expenses at his other businesses — Joe Momma’s Pizza, The Fur Shop and The Phoenix — through a company called The Engine Room LLC. Some payments to Joe Momma’s Pizza occurred after the restaurant was closed due to a fire last year, the suit alleges.

The allegation that Ewing transferred money from one business to another isn’t new. A former business partner in a failed downtown grocery store alleged in an earlier lawsuit that Ewing shifted money intended for the grocery store to his other businesses to stay afloat.

Investors in another business (Joe Momma’s Pizza) repeatedly asked Ewing for financial accountability and questioned what happened to insurance proceeds after a fire there last year, according to emails obtained by The Frontier.

The Max lawsuit contains serious allegations about a sitting city official and without question was newsworthy in October after we and most other media outlets wrote about it. Kevin Canfield also wrote a story in which people including Mayor G.T. Bynum and City Councilor Anna America lauded Ewing’s vision and commitment to improving the city, especially its downtown.

What made the lawsuit newsworthy in the first place was the bigger picture.

An investigation by The Frontier and our media partner NewsOn6 in October found that Ewing borrowed heavily to open multiple businesses at the same time, clashed with investors seeking financial information and his businesses failed to pay state sales and beverage taxes already collected.

The state has cited Ewing and his businesses for failure to pay state sales and beverage taxes in at least 19 separate tax liens filed since 2010, records show. The liens sought payment of about $168,000 in taxes already collected by five of Ewing’s businesses but not paid to the state as required by law.

So what made the amended lawsuit newsworthy this week? Ewing’s own statements.

After our initial story, Ewing took to Facebook to protest, claiming that he had tried to work things out with his investors but they wouldn’t meet with him to examine the business’s books.

“They have refused to review the company’s books or to meet to discuss their concerns, instead basing their claims on conspiracy theories derived from incomplete financial information,” Ewing said in the Oct. 14 Facebook post.

But in the latest version of the lawsuit, his business partners in the 80s-themed bar directly contradict that claim. Their new petition says that as of Dec. 16, months later, Ewing is still refusing to give them access to financial records of the business as he agreed he would when they invested.

So either Ewing is making false statements in a public forum — by claiming the investors have “refused to review the company’s books” — or his investors (one of them an attorney who ran for mayor) filed a lawsuit with new allegations about him that are false.

In our estimation, this is news either way. It’s not a huge story but a relevant update to a story some of our readers have followed closely and urged us to continue reporting on.

Would it be news if Ewing were a private citizen? Probably not. When you hold public office, this kind of scrutiny comes with the territory and we won’t apologize for it.

As a Tulsa city councilor, Ewing is responsible for oversight of millions of dollars of your tax money. If his own partners in three businesses allege he isn’t honest with them, how can taxpayers be confident he’s being honest with them?

This is a fair question and it’s up to those who read the stories to determine whether the investors’ claims are relevant and if so, to what degree.

Before we posted the story, Kassie tried to reach Ewing’s attorney, who was out of town and not immediately available.

I searched court records for an answer to the lawsuit filed by Ewing’s attorney but found none. We did include his October Facebook post in the story, in which he vehemently denies the allegations and explains his position.

After the story was posted, Ewing reached out to us and asked us to remove the story from our website. The lawsuit, he claimed, had been settled. While Ewing may believe the dispute has been settled, nothing to that effect has been filed in court and the lawsuit remains pending to this day.

We added his claim that the suit has been settled to our story and refused to remove the story from our site. (When a lawsuit is settled and dismissed, that is reflected on the court’s docket which it isn’t in this case.)

We contacted Perkins to determine whether an agreement to settle the suit had been reached and here’s what he had to say: “We signed a settlement agreement that contained several conditions, which, when fulfilled, would result in a dismissal of the lawsuit. If and when they are fulfilled, the plaintiffs will dismiss the lawsuit without prejudice and the parties can issue a statement at that time.”

Signing a conditional agreement to settle a suit is not the same thing as dismissing the lawsuit following a successful settlement. In fact, a lawsuit by his business partners in a failed downtown grocery store alleges he reneged on an agreement to repay money the partners claim he funneled to his other businesses.

I informed Councilor Ewing that the plaintiff did not agree that the lawsuit had been settled. Nevertheless, I received numerous angry texts from Ewing Saturday night, including mocking The Frontier’s decision to move to a nonprofit model and calling me “pathetic” and “shameful.”

Since he said that I should share them with readers, feel free to read them here.  (At his request, we removed his cell phone number.)

Did I handle the situation perfectly? Probably not. But I tried to be responsive while not accepting bullying language from a councilor who, according to numerous people I’ve spoken to in the past, has been known to engage in bullying behavior.

We sincerely wish Councilor Ewing the best as he continues the important business of making decisions and looking out for this city we all love.

Nobody questions his devotion to Tulsa and his advocacy for downtown has been an important contributor to its rebirth. He’s certainly not the first person to fail at starting a business or to have public disagreements with investors.

The businesses that he started were quite popular and Ewing clearly has a knack for entrepreneurship. We hope he continues starting and operating businesses in Tulsa.

We will certainly report the outcome of this lawsuit, whether it is dismissed or not. We’ve invited Ewing to sit down for an interview with us in the past and he has refused but we want to make it clear: That offer remains.

The post Blake Ewing wants you to read these angry New Year’s Eve texts about his lawsuit … appeared first on The Frontier.

Illustration by Dylan Goforth

One of my favorite things to do is sit in the rocker in my daughter’s room and hold her at night while she sleeps. The house we moved into this summer has big windows in her room, and if you look out of them at night you can catch a glimpse of passenger planes cruising slowly by on their way to the airport.

Sometimes when she’s sleeping, she’ll suddenly open her eyes and say something, then throw one hand in the air in protest before falling back asleep. She’s only just had her first birthday. What are dreams like before you have language?

My first year of dadhood has been a whirlwind, which is appropriate given the fact that I found out my wife was pregnant about an hour after my Tulsa World bosses found out I was quitting my job. Timing has never been a speciality of mine.

So Evie was born December 2015, and seven months later my wife and I bought our first house. Now my daughter is walking all over the place and talking nonstop, though it’s mainly gibberish and it’s mainly aimed at our two dogs.

When we told my mom we were having a baby, her husband took me aside and said that the first time you see your child, you feel a love unlike anything you’ve ever felt before. But when Evie was born I was too stunned to feel anything. I just looked at my wife and said “You did it.” It wasn’t until that first night in the hospital, when my daughter woke up with the hiccups and I rocked her back to sleep in front of a mirror, that I understood what he was talking about.

Sometimes I look at her and a strange feeling comes over me, like “how did I get here?” I can’t exactly explain it, but it almost feels at times like I’ve only suddenly woken up in this life I share with my wife and daughter.

Last year, I said that looking her ultrasound pictures made me realize how she was the culmination of every event in my life. Every life-altering moment led me to her. Now that she’s here, when I look at her I feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

I’ve always been a committed person — committed to work, to my friends, to my family. And as a parent I’ve struggled finding the right balance. How much do I owe my employer? How much do I owe my family?

How much do I owe myself?

I know the greatest responsibility I have is to my daughter. After all, my employer chose to hire me. My wife married me out of her own free will. No one consulted Evie before we brought her into this world.

Right now I’m writing this on my phone, and she’s sleeping on top of me, her little hands crossed in front of her and her head on my chest. Every moment comes with a sense of dread and excitement, because her life is full of infinite possibilities. What will she become? What role will I play in that? How do I open the world up to her when I often don’t know how to do that for myself?

It’s strange how quickly she changes. Time feels like it’s simultaneously moving too slow and moving too fast. One minute I’m lamenting that she won’t sleep through the night and the next minute I’m melancholy because she doesn’t want to sit on my lap, she wants to get up and run. Every day has at least one moment that drives you crazy and at least one moment you want to hold onto forever.

I’ve said before that I owe every good thing in my life to the chance encounter with my wife. I changed from a stagnant, confused 20-something into a hard-working, motivated adult out of a desire to be a good boyfriend/fiance/husband.

And yet being a dad is the greatest thing in my life by orders of magnitude. The journey itself hasn’t been unique; millions of parents every day witness the same milestones I’ve seen in my daughter over the last year. But my memories of her her first laugh, or her first steps, are mine alone, and I can relive them in my mind whenever I want.

I have no idea what the next year will bring. What are 2-year olds like? What can they do? I’m sure it will be fun and terrible and awful and wonderful.

But for now we’ll just sit here and watch the planes fly by.

The post Diary of a new dad: Growing under the shadows of passing planes appeared first on The Frontier.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. Courtesy NewsOn6

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has spent years railing against and suing the federal government. Now he’s going to join it.

Continuing his string of ironic cabinet picks, President-elect Donald Trump named Pruitt Wednesday to lead the EPA.

Pruitt’s close relationship with the energy industry drew the most fire.

“Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a news release.

“He is a climate science denier who, as Attorney General for the state of Oklahoma, regularly conspired with the fossil fuel industry to attack EPA protections.”

Pruitt probably wouldn’t disagree with the spirit of that comment. His own bio claims he’s the “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was also, predictably, not enthusiastic.

EPA nom Scott Pruitt stands with big oil & climate deniers, not American families who fight for #CleanAir & #CleanWater

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) December 7, 2016

“Attorney General Pruitt’s reluctance to accept the facts or science on climate change couldn’t make him any more out of touch with the American people – and with reality,” Schumer told the Associated Press.

The New York Times greeted the news this way: “Trump picks Scott Pruitt, climate change denialist, to lead the EPA.”

Other media outlets had positive-leaning stories about the choice, including The Oklahoman: “Trump, Fallin applaud Scott Pruitt EPA appointment.”

Fallin issued a news release Thursday calling Pruitt “a tireless advocate of the precious balance of power between state and federal governments.”

“I applaud President-elect Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA. He will ensure states retain their decision-making policies, instead of having them transferred to the federal government.”

It’s interesting to see politicians such as Pruitt clamoring for the right to give away their authority, when they get it, to the states.

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe had perhaps the most interesting positive reaction to the choice, claiming that Pruitt “has demonstrated that he is an expert on environmental laws … and a natural pick for this role.” 

Inhofe has been a happy warrior against attempts to deal with global warming, once bringing a snowball into the Senate chambers as proof that it wasn’t happening. Because, hey, it still snows sometimes. 

Trump has called global warming a hoax made up “by and for the Chinese.”

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

In Pruitt, has chosen an EPA administrator who also casts doubt on the scientific connection but cloaks his words in a more acceptable tone.

In a column in the National Review in May, Pruitt wrote: “Global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connections to the actions of mankind.”

Actually, there’s practically no debate among legitimate (non-industry funded) scientists about this issue: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is occurring and the burning of fossil fuel is the culprit.  You can read all about that here.

The Washington Post noted that Pruitt “is the third of Trump’s nominees who have key philosophical differences with the missions of the agencies they have been tapped to run.”

(Ben Carson, tapped to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Betsy DeVos, named education secretary, are the other two.)

As the Post and many other media outlets pointed out, Pruitt is fond of suing the agency he’s been chosen to lead.

Records show Pruitt has been involved in more than a dozen actions of some kind targeting various EPA policies, including being a petitioner, co-petitioner or intervenor in at least six lawsuits against the agency.

A release from Trump’s transition team called Pruitt “an expert in Constitutional law.”

Pruitt had a relatively short career as an attorney in Oklahoma before joining the state senate and becoming attorney general. While Pruitt has signed his name to a number of federal lawsuits, some that involve constitutional issues, this claim is a stretch.

In fact, as BuzzFeed’s Chris McDaniel reported, Pruitt’s office misled the nation’s highest court about evidence in a case of clearly constitutional significance: the death penalty. He later said the error was not intentional and didn’t matter anyway.

While the Supreme Court upheld Oklahoma’s right to use a new lethal drug as part of its death penalty process in that case — Glossip v. Gross — it was a bumpy ride for Pruitt.

During arguments before the court last year, Pruitt’s solicitor general argued that the state was perfectly capable of carrying out an execution that complied with the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

During the hearing, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor said she would not believe the statements contained in Oklahoma’s brief unless she verified them herself.

“Nothing you say or read to me am I going to believe frankly until I see it with my own eyes,” she said. She later said the state’s experts on midazolam “didn’t prove their point at all.”

In fact, as The Oklahoman’s Graham Brewer reported, Oklahoma had already used the wrong drug (a substitute not in the state’s approved lethal protocol) to execute a prisoner months before those arguments.

Months after the hearing, the state almost used the same wrong drug a second time to execute Richard Glossip.

Richard Glossip had eaten his last meal and was watching television news to figure out why he wasn’t dead yet. https://t.co/1IpSPEBTyi

— Ziva Branstetter (@ZivaBranstetter) September 30, 2015

Pruitt claimed he didn’t know that DOC had obtained the wrong drug. But as the state’s top lawyer and a purported constitutional scholar, it’s reasonable to ask whether Pruitt should have known about this snafu both times.

Be sure to grab some popcorn and watch the confirmation hearings. 

The post Pruitt’s nomination to lead EPA draws jeers, cheers appeared first on The Frontier.

The lawsuit, in which I’m a plaintiff, notes that there is growing and widespread interest in government officials’ use of private email to conduct public business. The suit cites cases involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Fallin says in a response filed last week that it’s a mistake to compare her use of personal email for state business to the controversy surrounding Clinton’s email.

That’s an important distinction for the governor, considering she talked to President-elect Donald Trump Monday about job opportunities in his administration.

Fallin is being considered for a job heading the Department of the Interior. (She said the meeting was just an initial meeting and she wasn’t offered a job.)

But back to her emails.

Trump, you’ll recall, repeatedly said his Democratic opponent should be locked up for using private email to conduct government business when she was secretary of state. Clinton was cleared of wrongdoing by the FBI.

Legal filings that are part of an Open Records Act lawsuit I filed two years ago against Fallin and the Department of Public Safety detail the governor’s use of at least one private email address — maryfallin@sbcglobal.net — to send and receive emails related to official business.

The lawsuit contains about a dozen examples in which the governor and members of her staff sent and received emails about important state business — a botched execution and the state’s largest earthquake — on their personal email addresses.

Falin may use other email addresses but we don’t know, since her address has been redacted from nearly all personal emails produced as part of the lawsuit. There’s some indication she may now be using a second personal email address.

The lawsuit filed in Oklahoma County District Court along with the parent company of the Tulsa World, my former employer, seeks emails and other records related to the botched execution of Clayton Lockett, whether sent or received on personal email accounts. It also seeks transcripts of interviews recorded as part of the state’s investigation.

Fallin says in a response filed in the case that she can do her job “more efficiently” because she and key members of her staff communicate using their private email addresses. However, the public has no need to know what those email addresses are and copies of the emails should wind up on the state’s server anyway, the governor’s attorneys claim.

They say they have a dual system in which emails are sent to both personal and state email addresses, enabling the state server to preserve any public records. However it’s not clear from the records the state has produced whether that is always true.

Fallin’s response sidesteps the issue of whether her business-related personal email is preserved, archived and searched when responding to open records requests. She focuses instead on opposing release of her personal email address.

“The public knowledge of (Hillary) Clinton’s personal email address did absolutely nothing to protect the public’s interest in archiving and accessing Clinton’s emails,” states a motion recently filed by attorneys for Fallin.

“In stark contrast, Governor Fallin, and members of her staff, utilize non-state email address, on occasion, to expedite the receipt of information and more efficiently perform her duties as the Chief Executive of this state.”

For now, let’s set aside the fact that it makes no sense to claim using a personal email address is somehow more efficient for doing state business than using the state’s email system. Unless the state is using a dial-up modem.

Some background is in order.

This legal saga has been dragging on since I first requested these records 2 years, 6 months and 22 days ago. That adds up to 937 days of delay.

I filed a second request with DPS in September 2014 for the interview transcripts, which DPS partially replied to six months later. The agency continues to resist making public large portions of its interviews with state officials and witnesses.

I witnessed Lockett’s execution on April 29, 2014, during which an inexperienced doctor using needles that were the wrong size improperly inserted an IV. The execution was halted after Lockett spent about several minutes writhing and mumbling and he died 43 minutes after it began.

Regardless of how you feel about the death penalty, Oklahoma’s inability to get the process right has been embarrassing for the state.

Part of the media’s job in these cases is to uncover what went wrong and provide that information to citizens and policy makers so hopefully it doesn’t keep happening. But the breakdowns have continued, with DOC using the wrong drug during one execution and nearly doing so again when preparing to execute Richard Glossip on Sept. 30, 2015.

A state grand jury investigation found that the failures weren’t all accidental.

The grand jury report said the actions of Fallin’s general counsel, Steve Mullins, were “unacceptable” to “so flippantly and recklessly disregard the written Protocol and the rights of Richard Glossip.”

Mullins resigned during the fallout, as did DOC Director Robert Patton and prison warden Anita Trammell, who oversaw Lockett’s execution. For the second time since 2014, executions have been halted while the state rewrites its death penalty protocol.

The latest status report by Attorney General Scott Pruitt shows that Glossip and five other men have exhausted their appeals but the state is not ready to proceed with their executions.

Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton speaks briefly about the stay of execution issued for Richard Glossip after it was discovered the state didn’t have the correct drug.
SHANE BEVEL/The Frontier

Despite the obvious role of transparency in restoring public confidence, Fallin and DPS have fought to prevent public access to records that would shed light on the state’s deeply flawed death penalty process.

The Open Records Act requires “prompt and reasonable response” but Fallin’s attorneys had argued that judges have no right to intervene until the request is denied.

After a judge ruled that the governor’s delayed response was the same as a records denial, Fallin’s attorneys sought and received the judge’s recusal. In October 2015, Fallin’s office released more than 40,000 pages of records related to the execution, many of which were duplicate records and many with heavy redactions.

Cary Aspinwall — my former reporting partner at the World and The Frontier — and I pored over these records and noticed that the governor’s email address was often redacted, but only when it appeared to be a personal email address.

In an August 2014 email to Aspinwall, Fallin’s spokesman, Alex Weintz, wrote that “the governor has two email addresses: a ‘dot gov’ address and a personal email address.”

“Most of her emails are from the personal email address,” Weintz wrote. “Those emails that are related to official business on either account are subject to the Open Records Act.”

A 2009 Oklahoma attorney general opinion and numerous state and federal court decisions have made it clear that “an agency cannot shield its records from search or disclosure” by storing them in a private email account, as one federal court ruling concluded.

As part of our lawsuit, Fallin was asked to describe her efforts to retrieve “public records stored on unofficial or private email accounts or systems.”

Her answer: “If there are responsive emails/records from private email accounts contained within the records on the OMES (state) server, those responsive emails are produced in open records request responses, unless those emails are withheld due to privilege(s) or another exception to the Open Records Act.”

Gov. Mary Fallin says in a court filing that she uses personal email for state business because it’s more efficient at times. Photo courtesy NewsOn6

That lawyered answer doesn’t address what happens if emails subject to the Open Records Act never get to the state’s system because they aren’t sent to officials with state email addresses who were included in the original request. (To avoid excessive agency disruption, reporters sometimes agree to limit the number of officials whose emails are included in such requests, as we did in this case.)

Records produced in the suit show that at least two other top officials who worked for Fallin during the time in question, Mullins and Weintz, used personal email addresses for government business also.

If Fallin, Mullins and Weintz didn’t search their private email accounts, any emails they sent or received on those accounts that were supposed to be provided by law wouldn’t be included in the state’s response. And apparently, the governor’s office has no policy requiring such a search.

“The failure to conduct a search of non-governmental email accounts violates the governor’s obligations under the ORA,” the plaintiffs’ motion states.

The motion seeks an order from District Judge Bryan Dixon, who is presiding over the case, directing the governor to search for and produce email on non-governmental servers responsive to our requests.

Representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are attorney Bob Nelon, of the Hall Estill law firm in Oklahoma City, and attorneys Katie Townsend and Adam Marshall with Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.

In a response filed Nov. 14, attorneys for Fallin claim that “release of private email addresses of governor’s staff … is a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

(The Open Records Act does not specify personal email addresses in the list of identifiers that state employees may withhold from the public.)

The response states that Fallin has never denied that emails, if sent from a private address and related to official business, are subject to the Open Records Act.

An attorney representing the governor, Jennifer Chance, claims in the latest filing that she has searched Fallin’s private email address and found no relevant records. Chance’s statement did not address emails for Mullins and Weintz or list any emails withheld.

The governor and her staff use personal email “after hours, when staff has limited or no access to the state email server, when it is necessary for (the) governor’s staff to handle state business,” her response states.

However it’s unclear why the governor and her top staff members would lack access to their state email “after hours.”

The records produced so far include an email written on a Sunday by Weintz from his official state email account and emails to and from various officials on their state email accounts on a Saturday (Sept. 3) after the Pawnee earthquake struck.

Meanwhile, one of those emails sent after the earthquake, concerning emergency response and building safety, was sent to Fallin at what appeared to be two personal email addresses.

The state Office of Management and Enterprise Services handles IT services for state employees. Its website includes a link to a web-based version of Microsoft Outlook, which allows state employees to log in from anywhere with a web browser.

Additionally, if the governor is still using the SBCglobal.net email address for official business, that raises questions about how secure her email is.

The domain is now part of the AT&T email system hosted by Yahoo. Some users have found themselves locked out of their accounts due to the changing nature of the corporate relationship.

Additionally, hackers have targeted the email service, among others. In May, Reuters reported that about 40 million Yahoo accounts were among 270 million stolen email accounts being traded in Russia’s underworld.

https://www.readfrontier.com/those-pushing-redaction-queen-mary-for-vp-should-read-this/

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