Volunteer cop charged in death of black man
73-year-old says he mistook his gun for Taser before shooting suspect in Tulsa
WASHINGTON— An unarmed black man was shot dead in the street. The white man who pulled the trigger said he had made an innocent mistake.
The killing of Eric Harris unfolded like so many other cases of police violence. There was one notable distinction. The shooter was an insurance executive.
Paul Bates, 73, served as a cop for a single year in the1960s. He confronted Harris in his capacity as a Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office reserve deputy — a part-time, unpaid volunteer.
Police forces around the world, Toronto included, use volunteer officers without incident. But the April 2 shooting has raised questions in Oklahoma and elsewhere in the U.S. about their training, their necessity, and the role of money in determining how they are deployed.
Bates donated $2,500 to the local sheriff’s 2012 election campaign. He was also a major donor of guns and equipment to the sheriff’s office. When its Violent Crimes Task Force was attempting to bust Harris for allegedly trying to sell an illegal gun to an undercover officer, Bates was on hand to provide “support.”
“They mean to tell me that they did not have enough active-duty sheriff’s officers that could have been involved with this? Why was this reserve officer brought into this?” said Anthony Douglas, president of the Oklahoma chapter of the NAACP, the black advocacy group.
Bates was charged Monday with second-degree manslaughter. The sheriff, Stanley Glanz, had previously dismissed the shooting as an honest error: Bates claimed he had intended to use his Taser to subdue the fleeing Harris, a 44-year-old with a long criminal record.
A video of the incident — filmed with a sunglasses camera that may have been furnished by Bates himself — captured Bates saying he was going to fire the Taser. After he fired, he said, “I shot him! I’m sorry.” Harris screams, “He shot me. Oh my God,” and a deputy replies: “You f--ing ran. Shut the f--k up.”
Harris then says he’s losing his breath. A deputy replies, “F--k your breath.”
Reserve programs allow police services to take advantage of free labour. Richard Weinblatt, a former North Carolina police chief who has written books on reserve officers, calls the programs “the ultimate in community policing.”
“What’s better than actually getting pillars of the community — lawyers, doctors, reverends, people that have hooks into the community — now understand what it’s like to be a cop better than anybody else, practically?” said Weinblatt, the dean of Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis.
Weinblatt said “a lot of yahoos” apply to reserve programs seeking importance and power. But regular police forces also attract bad apples, he said. And he argued that reserve deputies can be effective in high-stakes situations with proper training.
Maria Haberfeld, chair of law and police science at the John Jay College of Criminal justice, said “it’s unusual that a reserve officer participates in a high-stakes situation like this.” She said she did not want to pass immediate judgment.
“Usually they are used more to control traffic, assist in various crime scenes — in the aftermath of the event, not during the event,” she said. “But I don’t know the particular situation of this department.”
The biggest recent reserve scandal before this month also involved allegations of “pay to play.” Oakley, a Michigan village of 300 people, had 100 reserve deputies. At least some of them bought the privilege: $1,300 each for the uniform and gun.
Toronto has 360 people in its version of the reserves, known as an auxiliary. Recruits get 15 days at police college, compared to 60 for regular officers, then spend six months in a kind of apprenticeship with the Divisional Policing Support Unit.
Their duties include crowd control, parade duty and searching for missing people. They carry batons and handcuffs but not guns, said spokesman Mark Pugash, and they are not deployed to “dangerous situations.” “That’s not their job,” Pugash said. The most famous reserve deputies are former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal and action star Steven Seagal. Most are average people. Warren Harrison, the chair of computer science at Portland State University, served for eight years in a rural county.
He spent hours transporting inmates to a distant jail, sparing regular officers to do real police work, and hours monitoring traffic. Some danger was inevitable even without especially risky assignments.