The apparent murder of Walter Scott has dominated recent discussion of shootings by law-enforcement officers, but spare a moment’s thought for Eric Harris.

Harris fled when sheriff’s deputies in Oklahoma tried to arrest him for attempting to sell a firearm and ammunition illegally. Among those who pursued him was a 73-year-old insurance executive and reserve sheriff’s deputy named Robert Bates. As the deputies struggled to subdue Harris, who was face down on the ground, Bates shot him. Harris died. According to Bates and the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, Bates meant to use his Taser but fired his .38-caliber pistol by mistake. There is video footage of the shooting from a deputy’s body camera. Here is the Washington Post with some details:

“I shot him!” [Bates] can be heard saying in video footage of the incident released Friday, nine days after the shooting. “I’m sorry.”
Moments later, the video reveals, Harris realizes he’s been shot.
“He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my God. I’m losing my breath,” a panicked Harris yells as an officer places his knee on the bleeding man’s head.
“F*** your breath,” a callous officer can be heard saying. “Shut the f*** up!”
Instead of tending to the gunshot wound, a second deputy yells at Harris.
“You shouldn’t have f***ing ran!” the man screams.
Despite the sound of a gun firing, Bates’s verbal admission and blood appearing on Harris’s shirt and arm, Sheriff’s Capt. Billy McKelvey told the New York Daily News that the arresting officers were unaware that a shooting had occurred.
He said paramedics and firefighters were called as soon as the officers realized that their suspect had, in fact, been shot.

Apart from Bates’s lethal mistake, I find two things about the incident troubling in the extreme.

First, the reaction of the deputies as quoted above. It’s not as if Bates’s pistol discharged quietly. Is it too much to ask that law-enforcement officers possess enough presence of mind, and be sufficiently capable of restraining their vindictive anger, to take notice of a gunshot, and perhaps to respond other than thuggishly when the arrestee begins blood-curdlingly to scream?

Second, it is troubling that the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office seems to be waging a public-relations campaign in behalf of Bates rather than maintaining a judicious silence as an investigation proceeds.

According to this report from the NBC affiliate in Tulsa, the sheriff’s office held a press conference in which it maintained that Bates had committed no crime, since his killing of Harris was accidental. The sheriff’s office also released a statement (which can be read here) in which it claimed to be “classifying this situation as a tragic event” (it was left as an exercise for the reader to infer what the situation was not being classified as). But the simple fact that a homicide is accidental does not necessarily absolve the person who committed it of criminal culpability. We have such legal categories as involuntary manslaughter and negligent homicide for a reason. Recall that Johannes Mehserle, a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for drawing his pistol and fatally shooting Oscar Grant III after announcing, “Get back, I’m gonna Tase him.”

Whether and how Oklahoma’s criminal code should be applied to Robert Bates is a question for a prosecutor to decide upon due consideration of the facts. In the meantime, the sheriff’s office should keep its legal opinions to itself and relinquish its investigatory role to some agency that has not revealed a blatant partiality.

One final, if tangential, point. It will be important to examine whether failures in training or procedure contributed to Bates’s error. I spoke recently with Christopher Gebhardt, who worked as a lieutenant with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and later as a SWAT-team leader in Utah. He mentioned that “D.C. was strict on where you carried things on your belt,” while the agencies he had worked for in Utah were not. In particular, the Metropolitan Police Department required officers to carry their “lethal and less lethal” weapons “on opposite sides,” precisely to lower the odds of their mistakenly grabbing one rather than the other. We don’t know why Bates mistook his firearm for his Taser, but the simple fact that the practice Gebhardt describes is not universally inculcated should worry us. (You may, incidentally, find it worthwhile to read an interview of Gebhardt conducted by the Libertas Institute, a think tank in Salt Lake City, in which Gebhardt offers his views on police militarization, the war on drugs, and civil liberties.)