The Tulsa Police Department is working with local retailers to authorize officers to issue citations to individuals who possess shopping carts off the premises without the permission of the store owner, downtown stakeholders were told last week.
Shopping carts are sometimes used by homeless people to store and transport their belongings, and their proliferation around the city — and the fact that they are often abandoned — has local leaders looking for ways to get them off the streets.
Tulsa Police Capt. Thomas Bell shared the initiative with downtown stakeholders Monday during a public safety forum hosted by TPD and Downtown Tulsa Partnership.
As Bell described it, retailers would be asked to sign a document stating that if police come upon a person who is in possession of one of their shopping carts, the cart would be considered stolen and a citation issued.
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The Tulsa Police Department did not respond to a Tulsa World request for more information on the program.
Mayor G.T. Bynum said the shopping cart issue has been a recurring source of concern at Housing, Homelessness and Mental Health Task Force meetings but added that he has not been made aware of the kind of enforcement plan outlined at the Downtown Tulsa Partnership forum.
“I’m not familiar with that,” Bynum said. “I did just sign a contract, maybe like two weeks ago, for our Public Works team. It’s a contract for an organization, if people see shopping carts like lying in a ditch or something, for a contractor to go out and pick them up.”
A man sleeps near his shopping cart downtown.
The mayor’s chief of staff, Blake Ewing, said he is working with service providers to identify an alternative solution.
“Nobody steals a shopping cart and loads all of their belongings into it to cause mischief. They do it because they have no reasonable alternatives,” Ewing said. “These are human beings. Oftentimes, everything they own is being kept in that cart.”
One idea being considered, Ewing said, is to provide a place for safe storage of a person’s belongings.
“If people experiencing homelessness are going to see an increase in enforcement, we should aspire to provide them a better answer to what happens to their belongings once the cart is taken from them,” Ewing said. “It’s to all of our benefit to have their items moved to a safe location rather than to have them left on the side of our city streets.”
Outgoing City Councilor Jayme Fowler pushed earlier this year for his colleagues to address the problem but failed to gather much support for the idea. Fowler said this week that he has not been part of the latest discussions, but he praised the effort.
“It is the transportation of choice for our unhoused here in the city of Tulsa. It is not an opinion; it is simply a statement of fact,” Fowler said. “And heretofore, city leaders, business leaders, have not wanted to address that issue in a positive and constructive way. And you just throw your hands up in frustration.
“It is one of these things we need to address in a positive and constructive way, so if business leaders and our first responders, our police, if they want to put something together, I applaud them, and I give them a tip of the cap.”
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