Owasso Vice Mayor Christopher Kelley is shown during a DUI stop in a frame capture from a police video. Courtesy
OWASSO — The former city manager ordered the purging of police video showing a DUI stop of the vice mayor because he wanted to save the councilor the “embarrassment” of the images reaching the public, a top municipal official said.
Assistant City Manager Sherry Bishop said she regularly met two to three times a week with former City Manager Rodney Ray, who accepted a resignation agreement June 25, about a month after the City Council ordered an independent investigation into his office.
In April, Ray ordered the deletion of two police videos showing the traffic stop of Vice Mayor Chris Kelley in February, a municipal memo shows.
Through a state Open Records Act request, the Tulsa World in mid-June obtained and posted a copy of the videos that had been secured by a police supervisor.
Ray has declined requests for an interview.
“He felt like that it was going to be published. It would be on YouTube,” Bishop said in a telephone interview. “His anticipation was that eventually somebody is going to know. Somebody is going to ask for it, and it will be on the Internet. And it would just be an embarrassment to Dr. Kelley.”
Told initially by Owasso police that he was being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, Kelley, a local veterinarian, ultimately was driven home by police and was not arrested, police said.
In a memo to Information Technology Director Teresa Willson dated April 25, Ray cited police policy relating to video and directed Willson to “purge the (Kelley) files listed below from our video files. There exist no case and no case reports relating to these files, thus they are unnecessary to maintain.”
The Owasso Police Department’s Policy & Procedure Manual states that nonevidentiary video and audio recordings are to be maintained for a minimum of 30 days after their creation. But because of data-storage limitations, access to the recordings can’t be guaranteed after 30 days, the policy states.
“Malicious destruction or deletion” of video is prohibited by the policy.
Bishop said she doesn’t remember exactly when Ray discussed the video, but she does recall conversations about it among Ray, then-Assistant City Manager Warren Lehr, Willson and her.
“It was more along the lines of how would this look to people,” said Bishop, adding that she is unaware of a case in which any other videos have been ordered deleted. “It would look worse than it was. None of us had seen the video.”
Read more in Sunday's World.
Owasso
The upgrade from 96th to 106th streets north is a candidate for federal funding assistance.
The former city manager ordered the purging of police videos showing a DUI stop of the vice mayor because he wanted to save the councilor the "embarrassment" of the images reaching the public, a top municipal official said.
