Earlier in the day, Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz described Bates as a longtime friend who made "an error" last week when he fatally shot an unarmed man trying to flee deputies during an undercover operation to retrieve stolen guns, the Tulsa World reported. The newspaper said Bates had donated thousands of dollars in equipment to the sheriff's department since signing on in 2008 as an unpaid reserve deputy.
"He made an error," Glanz said. "How many errors are made in an operating room every week?"
[Maura Larkins comment: Now that's a very interesting question. I'm guessing that juries are just as unlikely to find negligent doctors liable for deaths (almost never) as they are to convict police officers for killing unarmed suspects (see next story below). Both the medical and law enforcement fields need much better oversight.]
..Tulsa police Sgt. Jim Clark, who investigated the case, on Friday determined that the shooting was not a crime and did not violate department policy.
"Reserve Deputy Bates did not commit a crime," he said. "There's no other determination I could come to."
Clark cited "slip and capture," a psychological phenomenon where, under stress, someone's behavior "slips" off the intended path after being "captured" by a stronger response demanded by the brain...
Thousands dead, few prosecuted
by Kimberly Kindy, Kimbriell Kelly
Washington Post
April 11, 2015
Among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged, a Post analysis found. Most were cleared or acquitted in the cases that have been resolved.
On a rainy night five years ago, Officer Coleman “Duke” Brackney set off in pursuit of a suspected drunk driver, chasing his black Mazda Miata down rural Arkansas roads at speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour. When the sports car finally came to rest in a ditch, Brackney opened fire at the rear window and repeatedly struck the driver, 41-year-old James Ahern, in the back. The gunshots killed Ahern.
Prosecutors charged Brackney with felony manslaughter. But he eventually entered a plea to a lesser charge and could ultimately be left with no criminal record.
How the analysis was done: The 54
criminal prosecutions were identified by Bowling Green State University
criminologist Philip M. Stinson and The Washington Post. Cases were
culled from news reports, grand jury announcements and news releases
from prosecutors. For individual cases, reporters obtained and reviewed
thousands of pages of court records, police reports, grand jury
indictments, witness testimony and video recordings. Dozens of
prosecutors and defense attorneys in the cases were interviewed, along
with legal experts, officers who were prosecuted and surviving relatives
of the shooting victims.
Now, he serves as the police chief in a small community 20 miles from the scene of the shooting.
Brackney is among 54 officers charged over the past decade for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University. This analysis, based on a wide range of public records and interviews with law enforcement, judicial and other legal experts, sought to identify for the first time every officer who faced charges for such shootings since 2005. These represent a small fraction of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred across the country in that time.
In an overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.
When prosecutors pressed charges, The Post analysis found, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.
Brackney is among 54 officers charged over the past decade for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University. This analysis, based on a wide range of public records and interviews with law enforcement, judicial and other legal experts, sought to identify for the first time every officer who faced charges for such shootings since 2005. These represent a small fraction of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred across the country in that time.
In an overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.
When prosecutors pressed charges, The Post analysis found, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.
South Carolina shooting
Editor's note: This
video contains graphic content. A police officer in North Charleston,
S.C., has been charged with murder after shooting a man during a traffic
stop. Authorities said the decision to charge officer Michael Slager
was made after they viewed video footage of the incident that showed him
shooting the other man in the back as he was fleeing the scene.
(Obtained by The Washington Post)
In the most recent incident, officials in North Charleston, S.C., filed a murder charge Tuesday against a white police officer, Michael T. Slager, for gunning down an apparently unarmed black man. A video recording showed Slager repeatedly shooting the man in the back as he was running away.
“To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way,” said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who studies arrests of police. “It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”
But even in these most extreme instances, the majority of the officers whose cases have been resolved have not been convicted, The Post analysis found.
And when they are convicted or plead guilty, they’ve tended to get little time behind bars, on average four years and sometimes only weeks. Jurors are very reluctant to punish police officers, tending to view them as guardians of order, according to prosecutors and defense lawyers...
