By Journalist Mitchell Sadler (OBU)
Not all freshman delegates can find success at their first session. Some of them struggle
to get a handle on parliamentary procedure. Others can’t effectively move the body, and even
fewer bring bills in the first place. But freshman delegate Faith Gregory is the exception.
As a criminal justice major, she initially didn’t see the value that OIL could have for her
personally. After some convincing from her friends in Honors at her school, Oklahoma Baptist
University, she decided to give session a chance this spring. Initially, she was happy to see if one
of her three bills could hit the house floor, but at 11:30 AM today she got the news that her bill
would be hitting the floor as the freshman bill.
“I didn’t know that mine would be picked for the freshman bill! I wasn’t even ready! I had no idea what to expect.” she said. As for her bill inspiration, she was inspired by an incident at her summer job. A hostage situation across the street ended up with a SWAT team called in to de-escalate, and Gregory watched from her job as the team entered the building, de-escalated the situation, and returned with the perpetrator in handcuffs. But despite their success, her biggest takeaway from the situation was how long the SWAT team took to arrive. Her estimation was that the team took between two and three hours to even arrive on the scene, and almost as long to return with the hostage safe and sound. That eventually inspired her to create a piece of legislation that would
address that problem.
Gregory relayed these facts to me. Oklahoma City has no full-time SWAT team. Instead,
police officers volunteer for SWAT training, which consists of two training days a month, and
those officers are then called into action whenever necessary. This situation becomes more
interesting because Tulsa, despite having a smaller population and a similar crime rate, employs
a full-time SWAT team and benefits from much better response times and performance. She had
the research. Now, all she had to do was collate her knowledge, create some notes, and present
her bill. The basic idea of her bill was that Oklahoma City needs to have a full-time SWAT team
to help keep its citizens safe, and her bill provided for funding to ensure the new full-time team
would have enough money to function.
When I asked her how she felt after she presented, she said: “I thought I would be
intimidated. But I was wrong. I felt strangely calm after I started, and my biggest hurdle was the
number of questions I had to answer! It was nice to have so many people interested in what I had
to say.” If I hadn’t known that Gregory was a freshman, I would have assumed she was a House
veteran from her composure, steady presence, and engaging voice on the stand. Her bill
galvanized the body, and after answering numerous questions, the other delegates presented her
with two amendments. She accepted one, and the other, she rejected. It changed the character of
the bill entirely from a full-time provision to one that reallocated the funds to increase training
for part-time teams.
Despite Gergory’s opposition, the hostile amendment passed, and caused her
bill to be tabled for intensive work in committee. Even with the setback, her bill was still one that
provided for plenty of discussion within the House and taught her how the process actually
worked. I have faith that this bill won’t be the last OIL sees of Faith Gregory.