At least 15 officers mistook guns for Tasers; three were convicted
It happened in a flash. A deputy drew what he thought was his stun gun on a Black man who was fleeing, announcing his choice of weapon with a shout of “Taser!” But it was a pistol he pulled out, not a stun gun, and the man died. “Oh, I shot him,” the deputy says on video. “I’m sorry.”
Although the facts sound eerily familiar, that was six years ago in Tulsa, Okla., in a case that closely echoed what occurred this weekend in Brooklyn Center, Minn. There was the same announcement, the same tragic result, the same shocked response.
But what made the Tulsa case unusual happened in its aftermath: The deputy, Robert C. Bates, a reserve volunteer with the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, was charged by prosecutors, convicted at a trial and sent to prison.
The similarities between the 2015 case in Tulsa and the shooting death of a 20year-old Black man, Daunte Wright, in Minnesota on Sunday are striking — including the news Wednesday that Kim Potter, the officer who shot Wright, was charged with manslaughter. Six years after the Tulsa case, amid a fraught national conversation around race and policing, Wright’s death once again has provoked intense interest in how the legal system should treat such deadly use of force.
While it is rare for the police to mistake their sidearms for their stun guns, it is even rarer for charges to be brought against them in such cases. A New York Times review of 15 other cases of so-called weapon confusion in the past 20 years showed that only five of the officers were indicted. Only three, including the only two cases in which people were killed, eventually were found guilty.
“When you’re talking about cases where the excuse is it’s an accident, they’re just not easy to prove,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who studies the use of force.
The case in Minnesota, which Tuesday led to the resignation of Potter, who is white, and the department’s chief, has focused the nation yet again on the killing of an unarmed Black man by the police. The case is playing out only 10 miles from the courtroom where the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer accused of murdering George Floyd, is being held.
Captured on body camera video, Potter’s actions are an almost identical replay of what happened in Tulsa in 2015. While another officer struggles with Wright as he sits in the driver’s seat of his car, Potter aims her weapon, the video shows, shouting, “Taser! Taser! Taser!” After she fires one round, Wright groans in pain as Potter cries, “Holy (expletive), I just shot him.”
Kevin Gray, the lead prosecutor in Bates’ case, said the Tulsa district attorney’s office brought charges only after determining that Bates had not acted “like a normally prudent person should have” by reaching for his pistol when he meant to draw his Taser.
Gray said that prosecutors did not accuse Bates of murder in the shooting death of the man he killed, Eric Harris; they accused him of second-degree manslaughter. To prove that accusation, prosecutors had to show only that Bates acted with “culpable negligence.”
“The case was premised on the idea that an ordinary person, exercising caution and care, should have known what weapon they had in their hand,” Gray recalled. “We charged what we saw and what the evidence supported, not what might have been popular.”
In the 15 cases reviewed by The Times, two in which people were killed resulted in manslaughter convictions by juries; a third officer pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in a case in which someone was wounded. Two other cases are pending.
In 2014, Officer Jason Shuck shot a man who ran away from police when they approached him as he was panhandling outside a Walmart in Springfield, Mo. Shuck later told an investigator his “brain was saying Taser” but his “body moved faster” and he drew his pistol.
Local prosecutors allowed the officer to plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge. As part of the plea deal, Shuck, who quit the police department, agreed never to work again in a job that required him to carry a firearm.
Because the law grants the police enormous leeway to protect their own lives and those of others in situations they deem to be dangerous, it remains difficult to charge and convict them even in cases when they do not claim a shooting was accidental. It can be at least as difficult to bring charges when officers argue they made a mistake.
In 2017, for instance, Charles Gillis, a small-town Georgia sheriff’s deputy, claimed he had accidentally drawn his gun instead of his Taser and fired a bullet through the arm of a young man he and his partner were trying to arrest. After considering the case, the local district attorney said he found no negligence or criminal intent.