Just because he was 73 years of age doesn’t mean Bob Bates was beyond playing dress up. In his case, the fantasy was to pretend he was a cop, and the Tulsa Sheriff’s department offered a guy who just happened to donate enough stuff the chance to strap on a really cool uniform.
But not just a uniform. It came with a gun. A real, working, gun. A gun with which a guy like Bob Bates, an older fellow who might be scrutinized to determine whether he should be allowed behind the wheel of a car, was provided the chance to shoot and kill another human being. Via Tulsa World:
Robert Bates, the reserve Tulsa County deputy who fatally shot a man who was in a physical altercation with another deputy last week, has donated thousands of dollars worth of items to the Sheriff’s Office since becoming a reserve deputy in 2008.
Bates, 73, accidentally shot Eric Harris on Thursday, according to Maj. Shannon Clark, after Harris — the subject of an undercover gun and ammunition buy by the Sheriff’s Office’s Violent Crimes Task Force — fled from arrest and then fought with a deputy who tackled him. Bates, Clark said, thought he was holding a stun gun when he pulled the trigger.
Many police departments have “reserve” cops, though most prefer men and women with slightly more vigor than a 73-year-old. And don’t hand them a working gun.
If the part about grabbing the gun when he meant to grab the Taser sounds familiar, it’s the excuse that spared BART cop Johannes Mehserle from a murder conviction for killing Oscar Grant. As excuses go, it was miserably inadequate for a real cop. For a poseur like cop-wannabe Bob Bates, it’s absurd.
There are times when the police can use some extra hands, such as parades and crowd control at a Puffy Daddy concert, and it’s an opportunity to put old men in silly costumes so they can order around people who would otherwise tell them to go suck eggs. But while those types do little more harm than annoy people, the price of getting a costume with some real firepower is a bit higher.
“There are lots of wealthy people in the reserve program,” he said. “Many of them make donations of items. That’s not unusual at all.”
Bates has donated multiple vehicles, guns and stun guns to the Sheriff’s Office since he became a reserve deputy in 2008, Clark said. The Sheriff’s Office did not have an itemized list of donations made by Bates available Monday and deferred that question to the county commissioners’ office, which tracks those items.
This appears to be offered as some ironic rationale, as if buying one’s way to the authority to kill makes it more understandable, more acceptable. Hey, lots of “wealthy people” want to dress up like police officers and get to play with cool toys that shoot bullets. So don’t blame Bob Bates? Or don’t blame Bates any more than you blame the rest of the wealthy nutjobs who harbor some secret desire to shoot guns at people?
Aren’t old men allowed to indulge in their fantasy? If they pay the price of admission, why shouldn’t they be given a gun to go with that cool uniform, to be pulled out as desired. Or by mistake?
And was it a mistake? It’s certainly easy to believe that a 73-year-old pretend cop like Bates could grab his gun rather than his Taser, since wealthy donors get both weapons to wear on their Batman belts, and killed rather than stunned. Yet, the real Tulsa deputies didn’t seem too shocked by the shooting.
“He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath,” Harris then said.
“F*ck your breath,” an officer can be heard saying. “Shut the f*ck up!”
Bates can once again be heard lamenting, “I shot him. I’m sorry.”
The dead guy, Eric Harris, was no saint, coming under police scrutiny for selling drugs and guns. When he bolted, however, he was unarmed. When Bates shot him, he posed no threat of harm, except perhaps to a 73-year-old who felt compelled to take him down.
According to Maj. Shannon Clark of the Tulsa Sheriff’s office, Bates was combat ready.
Bates, who served as a Tulsa police officer for one year in 1964, is not compensated for his time assisting the sheriff’s deputies, and is classified as an “advanced reserve,” meaning he “can do anything a full-time deputy can do,” explained Clark.
Apparently, that includes shooting an unarmed man. It’s good to be a wealthy donor with a cop fetish. It’s good to be an old man given a gun in Tulsa. It’s not so good to be the guy he kills.
Update: Via WaPo, Bates has been charged:
“Mr. Bates is charged with Second-Degree Manslaughter involving culpable negligence. Oklahoma law defines culpable negligence as ‘the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions,’” Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said in a statement.
If you want to play cop and have a gun, the nonsensical excuse of “slips and capture” won’t save you from the exercise of due care.
Update 2: Tulsa World now reports that Bates’ training records were falsified.
Supervisors at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office were ordered to falsify a reserve deputy’s training records, giving him credit for field training he never took and firearms certifications he should not have received, sources told the Tulsa World.
At least three of reserve deputy Robert Bates’ supervisors were transferred after refusing to sign off on his state-required training, multiple sources speaking on condition of anonymity told the World.
The Sheriff’s office denies this, though concedes that some of Bates’ records were “lost,” specifically his firearms certification, but “announced early Thursday it will conduct an internal review of the deputy reserve program.“
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When the video was released, Major Clark described Bates as a “victim of slip and capture.” The dead guy, Eric Harris, was not described as a victim of anything at all.
Of course not. Harris is a bad dude, so much as his killing may not have been warranted, it was of no significance to the Tulsa Sheriff’s office. Just another guy who was unworthy of living anyway.
Slip and capture are mistakes that are made when you think you are doing one thing but you actually are doing another, and the result often is directly opposite of what you intended.
This slip and capture concept deserves it own post but all I really want to know is if this slip and capture concept applies to criminals doing criminal stuff or just the badged guys capturing the criminals doing criminal stuff?
We have a word for when the “slips and capture” argument is proffered in a criminal defense: conviction.
That’s why you get paid the big bucks.
And here I thought “opps” wasn’t admissible for the defense even when testified to by an expert witness or the evidence was obtained by a minor opps on the warrant or during a straight up opps search.
I really need to stfu and start paying attention.
What is this word for unboiling an egg, esteemed one?
Bates charged with Man 2. If Bates takes the stand, he can tell the jury “oops.” As for unboiling an egg, it’s a lot like unringing a bell.
Actually, researchers at UC Irvine just this year successfully unboiled an egg.
So you’re *that* guy?
The sad thing is that I’m not even convinced that the record of “real cops” is any better. I know of a couple similar incidents from regular members of a force. In a lot of small towns or rural counties (that doesn’t describe Tulsa Co. though), there’s not much difference between “friend of the sheriff” and “on the payroll” anyway. Becoming a full time police officer doesn’t mean that you have better judgment (and it shouldn’t mean that your mistakes of law should be excused while us ordinary citizens are expected to face punishment even without mens rea), it just means you have a badge, a uniform, and weapons.
And the third comment takes us down the rabbit hole. That was fast.
I say this comment without snark or sarcasm- police in Oklahoma were conducting gun and ammunition sales buy and busts? Really? Isn’t everyone allowed to have a gun there anyway? Isn’t this really the Oklahoma equivalent of busting deli owners for selling loosies? Or guys that set up a table on the sidewalk selling cell phone cases or stockings without a permit? It just makes me all that much more angry to see someone get shot in a low hanging fruit operation.
Love me some Merle Haggard, square lyrics and all, ironic or not.
He had priors, so he couldn’t possess any firearms. They go after those guys relentlessly around these parts.
I cannot fathom how many “accidental” shootings there have been before a video camera was in everyone’s hands? If one is to believe that these are “one off” incidence, then I have a wonderful plot of land to sell them in Falluja.
Police do brave work that many of us would not do. But lets not kid ourselves that they are any more perfect than the rest of us humans. It’s time for many police departments to have an attitude change and a refocus on what their mission is. It is to protect and serve us – not them.
We call this (or a variation thereon) the “standard caveat.” It’s the sort of thing that is likely to cause you to get a damn good pummeling around here.
Yeah, I’ve participated in the pummelling, but I’d like to apologize for that.
You see, the pummelling is based on the free market notion that the cop (or the cab driver or the logger or the deep sea fisher) knew what they were getting into and agreed voluntarily.
But obviously, in some cases, we don’t have a true contract because there was no real meeting of the minds. Whether the failed contract is between the policeman and his department, or between the department and the public, I cannot say, but many LEOs seem to view the badge as a sort of hunting license for unarmed civilians, and at least a few of the public don’t seem to share this perception.
We should clarify the terms of the contract. We could do this by specifying there is no implied hunting license, but if that drives up salaries too much by removing the reason that some were willing to work for a discount, then we’ll just have to make it clear to the public that they can’t afford cops who won’t shoot them.
Glorious exposition, Comrade.
Did someone use “fisher” and policeman in the same comment? No wonder people are dying in the streets!
Never mind….
Back to the point, that being, if the fisher fishes, the policing person certainly must police!
Did you know that “dude fishing” (where a tourist pays a commercial “fisher” to be a deckhand without pay) became legal in Alaska a few years back. The dude fisher only needs a sport fishing license too and does not even have to shell out the extra bucks for a commercial crew license.
Wanna guess how this works in real terms out on the boat? Anybody can do it right?
Let’s just say the dude fisher gets to do a lot of observing but without fail is allowed to participate directly in dealing with the catch after it is aboard. No one has been killed yet or lost any fingers or limbs to my knowledge.
Perhaps police departments should just drop all pretense and “man up”? Just pass on the donations and have the reserve policing persons include a check with the waiver contract. Fuck the reserve BS, dude policing is the future!
$5,000 per weekend to observe criminals being arrested and behind the wheel privileges to drive said criminals from the field to the jailhouse and you get to take as many hot laps around the town center as you want. With this package also you get to flip the siren switch on for calls and are allowed to play with the squad car intercom and you get to pull over your “friends” for looking at you the wrong way between the hours of 7a.m. to 7p.m.
$10,000 per weekend if you want to assist with traffic citations and field pat downs. This package includes full privileges during the handcuff trade off game at any bookings and unlimited access and latitude to lecture criminals even for non jailable infractions.
$20,000 per weekend is the all inclusive package* but any tazer discharge costs an extra grand per discharge and bullets cost 5K each to load** and carry around but you have to pay an additional 2.5K for any bullet discharged even if it is an accident.
*nightsticks will only be issued to field officers who wear a helmet at all times.
**extra mags will not be allowed to be carried on your person but will be available for purchase in the field.
P.S. If anyone is interested I think there will be some money to be made producing the orientation videos for dude policing programs across the country and I have just the non-union actors pool to draw from too. So, if you want to buy some shares in the “dude policing” orientation video start up send me an email.
This comment just caused coffee to come out my nose.
“Police do brave work that many of us would not do.”
I think you meant to say: Police do brave work that many of us (like Bob Bates) would like to do just for kicks every now and then, as long as we get a gun and badge too.
These kinds of honorary police officers are recurring scandal here in Cook County. Usually around here it’s not so much adrenaline junkies who want to bust bad guys, as in this case, but rather guys who want to be able to carry a concealed weapon or badge their way out of tickets or other police encounters. Some of them smell a little mob-ish — union officials, construction bosses, etc. — but sometimes they’re Bears running back Walter Payton, who had State Police credentials which, among other things, allowed him to have a gun. Like Bates, Payton accidentally shot a guy, although it wasn’t fatal. Amusingly, the AP story was full of all the usual circumlocutions for a police shooting — he was “involved” in the shooting when “the gun went off.”
No really, we want to know all about Cook County, because Walter Payton. Not off topic at all.
Because, ya know, the revolvers grip, felt just like the grip of the taser. Did anyone also notice that the revolver he dropped is taser yellow? And how in the f**k do you yell taser, taser… with your “taser” in front of you in the ready to fire position, and NOT realize that you do NOT have a frikkin YELLOW taser in your hand?
One would think.
Bates has donated multiple vehicles, guns and stun guns to the Sheriff’s Office since he became a reserve deputy in 2008, Clark said.
~~~
I wondered as I read about this yesterday just what on earth could have induced whoever was in charge to suspend whatever sense of good judgment they may have had to conclude that putting this guy out in the field with a gun was a good idea. Now I know.
I still think that all Tasers should come in pink. Not yellow, but pink. Also, make sure they don’t “feel” like a firearm. Make them (or the firearms, one or the other) a lot less “cool looking.” Make them feel different in the hand. Make it so that there is no way you can make this kind of stupid mistake.
Is this another case of but for video ??
Probably.
Now that’s a little dark even for you.
Go cheer yourself up and pass out some Hello Kitty tazers to some free range kids so they can defend themselves from social services or something this afternoon.
What little girl wouldn’t covet that Taser?
I read and reread your post several times. You left out the key point. There was a video of the shooting– a video. Do you think that without a video the Reserve Deputy would have ben charged? As a number of commenters, including myself, have noted, videos are slowly but surely proving to be game changers. That is why a number of articles by LEO’s, like the “invisible” signs one, have tried to discredit the evidence of videos. You missed the point on that one, and you again missed the similar point on this one. Ironically, LEO’s have seemed to realize what is going on more quickly than you. Perhaps you, to your great credit, have been focusing on the really terrible news with regard to police abuse and police immunity out there for so long that you are not sufficiently picking up on the news that thanks to video things getting slightly better.
By the way, there is clear and undeniable evidence that Bates is not a real deputy, He immediately expressed remorse for shooting Harris; the real deputy just cursed Harris.
It gets tiresome making the same point over and over, as in “but for video,” and so I expect that readers will already know and appreciate basic concepts. Most do. Then there is the person, you, who needs it spelled out for the hundredth time or they see the point as missed.
Perhaps you’re right, that it’s necessary for me to write for the lowest common denominator, the stupidest person on the internet, or I will be misunderstood. Yet, I prefer to think better of the people who read here.
I am glad to see that you are fully recovered from your vacation and back to your old self, substituting insult for argument when confronted with any criticism no matter how respectfully expressed.
Bro, pompously declaring you understand the real message and SHG dropped the ball is many things, but it ain’t respectful criticism.
David M: I made a substantive criticism, and SHG responded by insulting me. As to whether or not your summary of my criticism is a fair representation or a crude distortion, I will leave to the readers to decide for themselves. And, by the way, I’m not your “Bro.” But, hey, if SHG wants hugs all around, I’m fine with that.
Only a true bro would deny being my bro. I crown you Basileus Bromaion.
Dude, has it occurred to you that lawrence isn’t male? I mean, sure, Lawrence is a traditionally male name, but this is the internet and anyone can pick any name they want. And have you not read lawrence’s comments? Before you bestow the crown of Basileus Bromaion, consider that he’s a she-bro. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
OK. Alright, we can settle this now. Lawrence, on the strength of John Wick, would Keanu Reeves be a good choice for the next Bond?
And I’m glad that you’re glad. Hugs!
SHG: I was not going to comment again on this thread , but you really should have stopped while you were ahead. You will excuse me if I am not amused by last puerile comment . You have access to my e-mail address and can check that it is legitimate and that I am a Professor at McGill University. I ALWAYS comment under my own name, criticize under my own name, and expose myself to your criticisms , sneers, and insults under my own name– unlike most of your commenters, Not that there is anything wrong with that.
I tried to make a serious point, perhaps not in a sufficiently nuanced manner. The fact that Bates was actually charged, the fact that other police officers have been recently charged for murder on the basis of video evidence, the fact that LEOs are making speeches seeking to discredit video evidence , all indicate that an important something shift might be occurring.. I do not believe that you have devoted any blog post to a full discussion of this recently. I knew that rather than respond to my point in a serious way, you would just go ahead and insult me– you really are that predictable. I made my comment anyway, believing it was a valid one. But sure go ahead and insult me and my writing style again, if it makes you feel any better.
SHG: Here is a comment I posted today– under my own name, of course– on another blog. You can see how much I have learned from following your blog, and I am grateful to you for that. Otherwise why would I bother to stay and comment here and subject myself to your all too predictable insults?
lawrence kaplan > DF • an hour ago
I did not mean to imply that prison reform and reform of the US draconian sentencing regime are the sole concern of Democrats. I only pointed out that I was surprised that [X], who strikes me as genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor and oppressed minorities seems OK with the off the charts rate of incarceration and draconian sentencing in the US which fall disproportionately on the backs of those same poor and minorities. [X] writes of guilty criminals who are found not guilty. What of innocent people who are unjustly convicted? What of crazy sentencing for non-violent petty drug sales? Why doesn’t [X] look up the statistics of Blacks versus Whites sentenced for those crimes in proportion to the rates of their involvement? How about the disgrace of civil forfeiture? Or, better yet, [X], read Randy Balko and get back to me.
Reply
He’s “Radley” Balko, not Randy. And he’s got a great sense of humor. You could learn from him too.
For your birthday, Ima gonna buy you a sense of humor. You could really use one.
Just so you know, the puerile ones cost extra, but you’re worth it.
…Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. [Greenburg]? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for [Eric Harris], and you curse the [Tulsa Sheriff]. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Harris’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you NEED me on that wall…
Not to mix a metaphor, but
SHG: Yes, your last exchange with David M was a real scream.
My apologies to Radley– and thanks to you for pointing me to him.
Lighten up, Larry. Seriously. Be silly sometimes, especially given the nature of the things discussed here. We can either spend our time crying about the misery of it all, or enjoying the occasional laugh. Yes, I was being puerile. So what? lighten up and laugh more, even at the childish stuff.
Fair enough, I will try to lighten up. But by the same token, why don’t you try, when confronted with criticisms by a poster such as myself, who is your admirer and more often than not agrees with you, even if you disagree with them, not to lash out at him so unthinkingly and reflexively.
If anyone hasn’t done so, check out their web page that contains the application, for being a reserve police officer, it’s something to marvel at. I always thought your ‘permanent record’ was some imaginary thing teachers threatened high schoolers with but apparently they take it really serious in Tulsa.