So. Black man Eric Harris was killed by Oklahoma lawmen last week, accidentally shot in the back by a deputy who thought he was triggering his taser, not his gun. He didn’t unholster one instead of the other, he actually jumped out of the cruiser with a weapon in each hand! Funny thing about that deputy… –But first let’s make clear that the Tulsa County Sheriff has already excused the officer of wrongdoing, likewise all the other cops who piled on Harris as he died, mocking his final breath. “Fuck your breath” said one cop as they kneed Harris’ face into the pavement until he died.
So triggerman Robert Bates was an “Advance Reserve” deputy, a retired insurance exec who donated to the department and thus was allowed to ride along with regular deputies and use tasers on people and other fun stuff. Bates used to be a cop in 1965 when black men were lynched more regularly –so White America believed. It turns out nothing has changed since those days. Except that today’s lynch mobs are not open to the public, today extrajudicial executioners have to wear a badge. Naturally good ol’ boys like Bates want a piece of that action.
It turns out, to be a volunteer donor-deputy is also a license to kill. Bates flat out shot Eric Harris as he laid on the ground. Though lawmen were converging from multiple vehicles and the winded Harris was already prone, someone called “taser, taser”. That’s when Bates pulled his gun instead and fired. Then Deputy Oops said “I’m sorry. I shot him!” The other deputies now pretend they didn’t hear Bates, or the gunshot. That is their defense for climbing on the victim and hastening his death.
The whole gruesome execution is on video, which the Tulsa County Sheriff supplied to make the case that the officers acted appropriately.
One of these days, a video will emerge of a deputized-donor riding along wearing a white hood and a noose.
“Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview reports the NYT. 
On this anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, March 16, 1968, let’s remember a time when the American public was not rallying behind its soldiers as they murdered women and children in the conduct of modern warfare. We did not support the troops who shot civilians under orders, or wiped out entire communities. We did not sanction it as collateral damage, the killing we knew about.
We’re still trying to bring Serbs to justice for that very crime in Srebrenica. That’s a criminal ROE and all soldiers have an obligation to question such a rule. The Nazis claimed they followed orders. Not good enough. Still a crime.