TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa city council heard from two community leaders during a City Council Public Works Committee meeting Wednesday, presenting statistics showing racial and economic lines' effects on children.
The directors of the Tulsa Dream Center and Youth Services of Tulsa reported black youth in Tulsa are now five times more likely to get arrested than their white classmates.
“The only way this is gonna be improved is if we have lots of partners and different people at the table,” Beth Svetlic of YST said during the meeting.
Wednesday’s presentation came from a joint report by YST, the Dream Center, and the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University.
“Core to what we do is making sure that we’re serving the marginalized and underserved youth in our communities," Svetlic told 2 News Oklahoma. "And this is definitely one of those areas that’s really important to us.”
Stats presented include Tulsa’s Black youth accounting for 27% of the city’s referrals to Oklahoma Juvenile Affairs despite being just 10% of the population.
Tulsa Dream Center’s Tim Newton isn’t surprised by the numbers. He sees the positive effects of after-school programs at his organization's community center in north Tulsa for elementary-aged kids, but said the city should pay more attention to providing resources to older age groups to avoid inequities and unemployment.
The presentation slide that Newton felt was most sobering included survey responses from Tulsa high schoolers. Written comments include that the juvenile legal system takes bad kids and makes them worse, some view law enforcement as terrible and they feel targeted, and a 12 year old writing that “it seems like Black people are treated more unfairly than white people.”
“I saw them write those things down. I saw some of them write it with tears in their eyes,” Newton told 2 News.
Both Newton and Svetlic hope the city will heed to their appeals for more focus.
“I think we can make some assumptions that if we’re not working to fix the system and working to fix the problem then it’s only gonna continue to be a bigger discrepancy moving forward,” Svetlic said.
“(It needs to be) more of a priority. Just like we have a priority for homelessness, let’s get a priority for youth programing," Newton said. "'How do we make this a focus?' These are crises in our community.”
Newton added that surveys of kids in Tulsa's public schools, especially north Tulsa, will continue in the coming years in part to serve as progress reports for the city’s disadvantaged areas.
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