Oklahoma officer charged in killing of black man after Taser 'mistake:'Sheriff’s office found fatal shooting of Eric Harris by deputy Bob Bates was ‘a mistake’ but family says: ‘This is simply evil’: Tom Dart, The Guardian, 13 April 2015

A 73-year-old insurance salesman and reserve sheriff’s deputy has been charged with second-degree manslaughter after he appeared to accidentally fire his gun instead of his Taser and shot dead an unarmed man, Eric Harris. 

Harris, 44, died on 2 April after a sting operation designed to catch him selling a gun went wrong. He fled on foot but was caught and wrestled to the ground. 

In video released by the Tulsa County sheriff’s office, the deputy, Bob Bates, yells “Taser”, then a shot is heard and he says: “I shot him, I’m sorry.”

A gun is visible on the ground next to Harris, who cries out in pain: “Oh God, he shot me, I didn’t do shit.”

WOW. RT @deray: in his hand: type of gun that killed  #EricHarris --  on table: gun type sheriffs lied & said was used: image via Coach Kitty @CameraOnAmazon, 13 April 2015

On Monday the district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, told the Guardian the sheriff’s office had provided him with the findings of its investigation on Friday afternoon.

In filing the charges on Monday, he said: “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.”

Harris’ brother, Andre Harris, told reporters at a news conference on Monday that officers from the sheriff’s department tried to discourage him from hiring an attorney.

He said he did not believe the shooting was “a racial thing. I don’t think this has anything to do with race. It might have a hint there somewhere. … This is simply evil.”

“When you’re the law, I guess you feel like you can do things and get away with it and not get exposed. Well, we’ve come to expose it. We’ve come to pull a mask off the evil.”

Bates, a wealthy insurance executive in the Oklahoma city, was named the department’s reserve deputy of the year in 2011. He worked for the Tulsa police department for a year in the mid-1960s and is one of 130 volunteer reserves in the sheriff’s department, according to Tulsa World, which said he had donated equipment as well as $2,500 to the re-election campaign for sheriff Stanley Glanz in 2012.

Did the 73-year-old man who shot and killed #EricHarris pay to be a cop in his spare time?: image via CNN International @cnni, 13 April 2015

Glanz, 72, told Tulsa World he had not given his friend and fishing companion special treatment and that the sheriff’s office once had an 81-year-old deputy. Bates simply “made an error”, Glanz said. “How many errors are made in an operating room every week?”

On Sunday, the Harris family issued a statement which said they “do not believe it is reasonable for a 73-year-old insurance executive to be involved in a dangerous undercover sting operation” and added: “We do not believe it is reasonable -- or responsible -- for [the sheriff’s office] to accept gifts from a wealthy citizen who wants to be [a] ‘pay to play’ cop.”

History lives in the present. Never forget that fact. America's slave patrol police. #ericharris #walterscott: image via chauncey devega @chaunceydevega, 11 April 2015

In the video of events in Tulsa, which came from a police body camera, officers continue to try to subdue Harris, one shouting: “Shut the fuck up ... You ran, motherfucker, do you hear me, you fucking ran.”

When the 44-year-old says “I’m losing my breath,” an officer replies: “Fuck your breath.”

kneeling on his head, left hand grabbing neck, right hand clenched ready to punch #ericharris #firstaid: image via Mike Spangenberg @MikeSpangenberg, 11 April 2015

I am a Black woman with asthma. I cannot even engage with "f--k your breath" as something that one human being says to another human.

-- tweet via Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach, 13 April 2015

The unimaginable cruelty of a world where a cop says "f*ck your breath" as you lay dying. Have mercy, God.

-- tweet via Yolanda Pierce @YNPierce, 13 April 2015

 

Hollow. I don't have words for #EricHarris. My words won't form. His last words - and his murderers' vile answers - keep ringing in my ear.

-- tweet via Ava DuVernay @AVAETC, 13 April 2015

There's not much more barbaric than continuing to physically/mentally terrorize someone as they lay dying, screaming in fear. #Eric Harris

-- tweet via Jesse Benn @JesseBenn, 13 April 2015

"F*ck your breath" is the experience.

-- tweet via StLNYC @StLnNYC, 13 April 2015

Westworld – Onde Ninguém Tem Alma | Retrospectiva #Westworld #MichaelCrichton: image via A Fábrica @Fabdeexpressos, 9 March 2015

Harris died in hospital.

In their statement, Harris’s family said: “Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the inhumane and malicious treatment of Eric after he was shot ... No human being deserves to be treated with such contempt. These deputies treated Eric as less than human. They treated Eric as if his life had no value.”

At a press conference last Friday, the Tulsa sheriff’s office said its own investigation had concluded that Bates had made a mistake and had not committed a crime. It brought in a Tulsa police sergeant, Jim Clark, as a private consultant.

 

Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark (right), acting as an independent consultant for the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office, and Sheriff's Capt. Billy McKelvey listen to a question during a press conference about the shooting death of a suspect by a reserve deputy: photo by Cory Young/Tulsa World, 11 April 2015

Clark told reporters that Bates was “a true victim of ‘slips and capture’”, a term used to describe a mistake when someone thinks he or she is taking one course of action but is following another.

It was an argument used by former Oakland police officer Johannes Mehserle to explain why he shot dead Oscar Grant at a Bart station in 2009 when, Mehserle said, he had planned to use his Taser.

Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The incident inspired the 2013 film Fruitvale Station.

Oscar Grant, shortly before being fatally shot by San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle, New Years Day, 2009: photo by Associated Press

Sorry, Oklahoma. You don't get to ban history you don't like: Going after history classes that don’t teach “American Exceptionalism” is anything but patriotic: Steven W. Thrasher, The Guardian, 19 February 2015

Negro drinking at "Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: photo by Russell Lee, July 1939 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Unappeased: The 1921 Tulsa race riot:  "It really destroyed my faith in humanity"

Olivia Hooker, 99, is one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. While her family home survived the destruction, the family lost everything else they had -– including her father’s department store. Hooker, who was only 6 at the time of the riot, had never experienced racism before the mobsters burned down Greenwood. After she witnessed white Tulsans loot her town, her perceptions of race were dramatically altered: "It really destroyed my faith in humanity". After 93 years of fighting for restitution, Hooker admits it is not likely she’ll ever receive anything: photo by Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

The Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, after the 1921 Tulsa race riot: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

African-Americans taken prisoner during the riot. An armed white man rides on the running board of the truck: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

Thousands of families were left homeless from the fire that raged through the 35 blocks of Greenwood during the riot: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014
 

Armed white men ride with a few black men in the car during the riot: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

The damage to the Williams Dreamland Theatre in Greenwood: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

Even then, there were people who wanted to pay restitution.

According to a 1921 New York Times article, Judge Loyal J. Martin, a former mayor of Tulsa who chaired the first race riot committee -- the Tulsa City Commission -- just days after the attack, said in a mass meeting that the city could redeem itself and move forward only “by complete restitution and rehabilitation of the destroyed black belt.”

"The rest of the United States must know that the real citizenship of Tulsa weeps at this unspeakable crime and will make good the damage, so far as it can be done, to the last penny,” he said.

But that never happened. Insurance companies denied claims from African-Americans, leaving them with nothing but the clothes on their backs, forced to start over or leave. Blacks tried to sue the city and state for damages but had their claims blocked or denied, according to the official report.

On June 14, just two weeks after the riot, Mayor T.D. Evans addressed the commission, telling it that the incident was “inevitable” and that the victims “should receive such help as we can give them.”

But then he said something else: “Let us immediately get to the outside fact that everything is quiet in our city, that this menace has been fully conquered, and that we are going on in a normal condition.”

In other words: The city should move on. And for 90 years, that’s what happened.

After an initial flurry of reports, with articles appearing as far away as the London Times, news of the “troubles” in Tulsa vanished.

A Tulsa man is detained during the riot: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

Greenwood did rebuild, bigger and better than it was before. But desegregation claimed Greenwood just as it did every black town in the United States; given the opportunity to spend money outside their own neighborhood for the first time, and the chance to live in areas previously off limits to them, African-Americans slowly but steadily moved away from the area, and the businesses left with them.

The Greenwood of today looks nothing like the once famous area. A highway overpass cuts right through the middle of the neighborhood. The sidewalks along Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street are lined with hundreds of plaques that each list the name of a business that was destroyed in the riot and whether or not it was rebuilt. Many were not.

But just behind the businesses on Greenwood Avenue is a shiny new baseball stadium, and across the street is a new luxury condominium building. A large chunk of Greenwood is now home to the Tulsa campuses of both Oklahoma State University and Langston University.

 An armed man during the riot: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

From the time of the riot, whole generations of Tulsans have grown up never hearing a word about the darkest moment in the city’s history.

Damario Solomon-Simmons, an African-American attorney in Tulsa, is one of them.

A native of North Tulsa, Solomon-Simmons attended Carver Middle School -- on Greenwood Avenue -- and still didn’t learn about Greenwood and the riots until he took an African-American studies course at the University of Oklahoma.

All of it -- the business district and the homes, the sudden destruction -- left him flabbergasted. He argued with his professor, telling him, “You’re wrong! I’m from Tulsa, I’m from North Tulsa, I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that.’’

Marc Carlson, a historian and archivist at the University of Tulsa who oversees the school’s race riot collection, said many of his students don’t know either, not even the ones from Tulsa.

“I don’t know why that is,” he said, adding that the state Legislature requires schools to include the riot in their curriculum.

Oddly, there is more awareness of the event in other countries than in the U.S.

Michelle Place, executive director of the Tulsa Historical Society, said requests for information about the riot are the society’s No. 1 inquiry.

"About a month ago I talked to someone in New Zealand. I’ve talked to Tokyo, I’ve talked to London,” said Place.

She can understand why city leaders might be reluctant to put it in school textbooks. But why, she wondered, didn’t the tale survive orally?

“The fact that it’s not just one of those things that we all knew took place,” she said and paused, “… takes my breath away, brings me up short.”

A dead body in the street, June 1, 1921: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

Firefighters extinguish the flames during the riot: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

A Ku Klux Klan gathering in Drumright, Oklahoma, 1922. The Klan's presence in Oklahoma increased after the riot: photo courtesy of Tulsa Historical Society via Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

Thousands of families were left homeless from the fire that raged through the 35 blocks of Greenwood during the riot: photo by Dexter Mullins for Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014

The Mabel B. Little Heritage House, one of the few homes to survive the riot, is maintained by the Greenwood Cultural Center. The home is filled with items typical of a home in 1920s Greenwood: photo by Dexter Mullins for Al Jazeera America, 19 July 2014