Karmen Glunt says her family wants “transparency and honesty” from Tulsa police after officers shot and killed her brother, Michael, Feb. 8.
But after she requested video of the incident from officers’ body and dashboard cameras, she said the department told her it would take eight-plus months for her to receive it.
In the days before the shooting, Glunt said Michael, 33, was experiencing a mental health crisis and having suicidal thoughts. He was autistic and dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder. She said they went to his doctor multiple times to get him into inpatient care, but his physician only doubled his medicine.
The moment of truth
As his symptoms worsened, his sister said Michael Glunt found the family gun and started walking east down 51st Street.
Glunt said their mom and a family friend found him pacing near Sheridan. When they arrived, she said he was agitated, tossed his phone in their mom’s car and said he wouldn’t need it anymore. That’s when they called the police telling them he had a gun.
“The cops were there, like, almost immediately,” Glunt told The Eagle about two weeks after the shooting. “They show up, guns drawn on and screaming, ‘Get your hands up.’ He looked at my mom, and he turned around and took the gun out of his pocket and raised his hand.”
But Captain Richard Meulenberg, the department’s public information officer, said when the first officer arrived, Michael Glunt pointed the gun at the officer and the cop fired his weapon — hitting him three times.
Glunt says her brother was pronounced dead at the scene. Police say he died on the way to the hospital.
Accessing the footage
So far, the only video Glunt and the public have seen was captured by bystanders with cellphones after shots were fired.
Glunt said that’s one of the reasons she requested the police video — to help clear up the narrative of what really happened.
Following the incident, Tulsa police said on Facebook they were responding to a call about a man with a “loaded firearm in his pocket and stated he was going to do something he can’t come back from.”
“That has a completely different context than an autistic man in suicidal crisis,” Glunt said. “I think being accurate and honest in their reporting would be great, and that would be less traumatic for us as a family as well.”
Also at issue for Glunt is how quickly her brother received aid after being shot. Police said in their Facebook post “additional officers arrived (and) provided immediate first aid.”
Witness cellphone video — posted to YouTube by Karmen Glunt — shows the aftermath of the shooting. It’s unclear how soon the video begins recording after shots were fired, but from the moment the clip starts it takes more than seven and a half minutes for officers to approach Michael Glunt on the ground, handcuff him and begin rendering aid.
The Glunt family believes bodycam footage would help establish a clear timeline. Meulenberg said they aren’t intentionally delaying releasing footage. But it’s a volume issue.
“Every single patrol officer in the field has a body camera,” he said. “Every day we’re uploading about 1,200 videos of contacts.” He said that can be everything from neighbors calling about a barking dog to incidents involving use of force.
Staffing not keeping pace
On Feb. 8, when Michael Glunt was shot, there were 1,583 videos uploaded, he said. The department stores videos for 26 months, which he says is much longer than federal government guidance of 90 days.
Meulenberg said they have a staffing issue and requests for footage are filled on a first-come, first-served basis unless there’s a subpoena. In that case, videos would be handed over without needing to be redacted.
“We don’t have the personnel to keep up with the redactions,” he told The Eagle. “It’s just a question of economics. We have lots and lots of video requests that come in, but we have to review them and redact them based on the Oklahoma Open Records Act.”
Still, state law says law enforcement must provide “prompt, reasonable access to records.”
“Lacking the capability to redact or obscure audio or visual does not relieve a law enforcement agency from producing records,” according to an information sheet from the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office.
“The delay is another way that public bodies don’t release information that belongs to the public,” said Kurt Gwartney, executive director of Freedom of Information Oklahoma, a nonprofit that advocates for government records access in the state.
But he said it can be tricky since there’s no definition of “prompt.”
Though it may only violate the spirit of the law — and not the law itself — Gwartney said there are ripple effects to consider.
“It destroys public confidence in the police,” he said. “You know, you have to wait eight months to get a video of a fatal shooting of a loved one. I don’t know that there are many people who would think that is reasonable.”
Muelenberg said he’s aware of those concerns.
“I just want the family to be able to get what they want,” he said. “And for us we have a lot going on in the city, and we don’t want people just to get high centered on something … But also it’s unfortunately part of the process.”
He said right now they’re saddled with “more demand than we have the ability to produce,” but they’re trying to fix the issue.
“We’ve made requests to increase that staffing, but there’s no budget because that’s not something that a sworn (officer) has to do,” Meulenberg said. “We’ve asked for (civilian employees) to do that, but there was no money in the budget, so we couldn’t hire additional people.”
“We will never be the same”
But Glunt is worried the officer who fired the shots — and also placed on leave — will return to duty before she and the public are able to see what really happened. Meulenberg said the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office will review all the evidence and conduct its own investigation into what happened.
Glunt said her family is still deciding whether they should pursue legal action, but it’s a path she’s only interested in if “it means that there’s change that happens.”
“I don’t care about a dollar,” she said. “I don’t want someone else’s family or someone else to go through what we’ve been through.”
For now, Glunt said she owes it to her brother to keep fighting.
“We will never be the same. There’s no words to describe how sad we are and how angry we are,” she said. “We’re on the early side of grief … but you know, 10 years from now, my brother’s still not going to be here, and I (can’t) imagine a day where I’m not angry about it.”
