The sheriff of Tulsa County, Oklahoma on Monday compared the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white reserve deputy to the kind of mistakes doctors make in an operating room.
The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office has said that Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, 73, accidentally shot Eric Harris on April 2 when he mistook his handgun for a Taser while trying to help another deputy subdue Harris. A video released over the weekend showed a deputy telling Harris “fuck your breath” when he complained of being short of breath after being shot.
“He made an error,” Sheriff Stanley Glantz told The Tulsa World newspaper. “How many errors are made in an operating room every week?”
Aside from being a reserve deputy, Bates is an insurance company executive who has donated thousands of dollars in equipment to the sheriff’s office. Glantz described him to the newspaper as a friend going back some 50 years who also had served as his insurance agent.
The Tulsa World previously reported that Bates chaired Glantz’s 2012 re-election effort and donated $2,500 to the sheriff’s campaign.
Asked whether the shooting was justified, Glantz told the newspaper that the question was difficult to answer.
“It was unintentional,” he said. “You know, justified means you had reason to do something. He had reason to get the gun out when the guy was fleeing.”
FFS. I’m not even sure I have any more to say.
I’d compare it more to running one of those canned hunting clubs, only in this one the rich people hunt down black people.
How many operating-room mistakes in a week? I don’t know. How many made in a week by a non-doctor guy who gives the hospital money so they let him stand around in scrubs with scalpels and retractors and a hat that says “Junior Surgeon” and all of a sudden he jumps in and starts sawing away on a patient? How many in a week? Say, I’ll take a crack at that one—my guess is the number of times that happens in a week is pretty fucking close to zero. How’d I do? Do I win?
He does know that a doctor making a mistake where the patient died often gets SUED, right?
What’s the big deal? It was just a ‘nigra’. It’s not like there is a shortage of them ya know. They are paid to breed. Them welfare Cadillac driving queens. /snark/