Five police chiefs cycled through the small Okmulgee County town of Beggs in just 16 months, a stretch of turnover so severe that burglaries piled up unsolved, federally issued rifles from the 1960s vanished without a trace, and a blood sample once sat inside a police-department refrigerator for 30 days. The findings come from a new investigation into the troubled department, which has struggled for years to keep officers on staff and the public safe.
According to Oklahoma Watch, the Beggs Police Department filed 35 burglary incident reports between 2020 and 2024. Only 12 led to arrests, and of those, just three suspects had charges filed against them — with only two ultimately charged. The outlet also found that the department's safe was missing M16 rifles issued decades earlier by the federal government, and the city had no records showing the weapons were ever reported missing.
Former city administrator Steve Barteau told Oklahoma Watch that an officer once left a blood sample sitting in a refrigerator inside the police department for 30 days in a case involving a death. The department also went without full staffing for extended stretches: after the city's agreement for assistance from the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office expired, only one officer worked at the Beggs Police Department for 48 days.
Officers Walk Out, Citing Conduct Concerns
The staffing collapse accelerated on July 29, when three officers resigned at once. As KJRH reported, those officers included Interim Chief of Police Daniel Gilbert, Assistant Chief of Police Bobby Tollette and Officer Bobby Sappington. The Beggs City Council held a meeting on August 4 to recognize the departing officers and name a replacement, appointing J.W. Mobley as interim chief — though he wasn't even in the room when the council voted him in, the station reported.
The revolving door didn't stop there. KJRH later reported that the department had dwindled to just one officer in training, as the city worked to rebuild its force from the ground up. City Administrator Steven Diamond told News On 6 that the staffing struggles weren't new, saying the city has had difficulty retaining chiefs and officers for roughly three decades. “We've had a lot of chiefs, a lot of officers over the last 30 years,” Diamond said, pointing to the department's long effort to keep coverage going around the clock.
Hollywood Comes to Town, and So Does a New Ordinance
Amid the turmoil, Beggs police officers found an unusual side gig: providing traffic control and temporary street closures during the filming of “The Lowdown,” for which they were compensated as independent contractors at $60 per hour, per the same Oklahoma Watch account. The arrangement appears to have prompted city officials to formalize the rules around film shoots. On September 14, the Beggs City Council approved an ordinance titled “Film Production Permits,” which now requires permits for any filming activity that involves city property, rights-of-way or services.
A Statewide Pattern of Vanishing Equipment
Beggs' missing rifles are not an isolated anomaly in Oklahoma law enforcement. Since 2021, the Oklahoma State Auditor and Inspector has identified more than 3,000 unaccounted-for items across sheriff's departments statewide, according to a separate Oklahoma Watch investigation into sheriff turnover audits. Those audits, however, are far from universal — only 47 of the state's 77 county sheriff's offices have gone through one, per KGOU. State Auditor Cindy Byrd has said the audits happen only at a sheriff's office's own request, and are often sought after a contentious election.
The scale of what turns up when an audit does happen can be striking. An audit of the Osage County Sheriff's Office turned up 796 unaccounted-for items, including 17 vehicles, 27 guns, 16 Flock cameras and 20 Tasers, the same KGOU report found. The sheriff there later located 21 of the missing firearms in employees' possession, while the remaining six were entered into the national gun file as part of an ongoing investigation. In Kingfisher County, a riot gun initially logged as missing turned up after Sheriff Aaron Pitts traced the discrepancy to a misnumbered label, according to the report.
Back in Beggs, the overlapping chapters of officer turnover, missing equipment and unsolved cases paint a portrait of a small-town department stretched thin for years. The reports on burglary cases, the rifles and the blood sample all stem from the same Oklahoma Watch investigation, and the outlet's reporting does not resolve what became of the uninvestigated burglaries or whether the missing rifles will ever be located.
