NEW YORK — An Oklahoma sheriff apologized Monday to the family of an unarmed man who was shot and killed by a volunteer reserve deputy but continued to defend the reserve program and his department generally.
Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz played down perhaps the most damaging claim made since the shooting: that training records showing that the volunteer, Robert C. Bates, was qualified for law enforcement work had been falsified by sheriff’s officials.
Glanz said his office was not looking into that claim, suggesting that there would have been no point in falsifying any records. “I could have waived all of those requirements if I felt like it,” he said.
Glanz said Bates was properly trained, but he stopped short of saying Bates was qualified to use the gun with which he shot Eric C. Harris to death on April 2.
The sheriff’s office has drawn national attention over the shooting, which was captured on video. Harris, 44, had run away from deputies who were trying to arrest him for an illegal gun sale.
Deputies had caught Harris and pinned him to the ground when Bates, a 73-year-old volunteer and friend of the sheriff’s, fired the fatal shot, apparently by accident, mistaking his pistol for a Taser.
Bates faces a charge of second-degree manslaughter.
“I want to speak directly to the Harris family,” said Monday. “We are sorry Eric was taken from you. I am sorry we were involved, and my sympathy goes out to that family.”
Referring to the manslaughter prosecution, he said, “I agree with what the district attorney has done.”
But when pressed as to whether Bates should have been working as a reserve deputy, the sheriff said, “Yes, he should have been,” and he called the reserve program vital to the office. He repeatedly said that the incident did not point to any broader problem in the sheriff’s office.
“Very rarely has the press ever covered the professionalism of this agency,” he said. “There’s been a lot of things said about the sheriff’s office that are untrue.”
Bates, a reserve deputy since 2008, also apologized to the Harris family, in an appearance Friday on the “Today” show, adding, “I rate this as No. 1 on my list of things in my life that I regret.”
Bates was a Tulsa city police officer for a short time more than 50 years ago, and his lawyer has said that until about a decade ago, he served as a reserve deputy for several years while living in Florida.
Glanz said that the Oklahoma office of the FBI had looked into the incident and found no wrongdoing by the department. An FBI official said the department would make a comment later, but if the sheriff’s statement was correct, it was not clear whether the FBI inquiry was limited to the shooting itself or included the claim of falsified records.
The sheriff’s office has 128 reserve deputies, who work on a volunteer basis and are allowed to carry firearms. Glanz described them as being essential to keeping the force at full strength, doing everything from crowd control at fairs to investigating cold cases.
Hundreds of law enforcement agencies have such reserve or auxiliary forces, but they vary in the kind of work those officers can do.
Bates was in the highest of three tiers of reserves within the sheriff’s office, meaning that he could perform nearly all the duties of a full-time deputy, including making arrests. He was not involved in the undercover sting that snared Harris but was one of several deputies who formed a backup force for that operation.
Members of the Harris family and their lawyer, Daniel Smolen, have criticized the way deputies treated Harris after he was shot, yelling at him to stop complaining.