Tulsa shooting

I'm doing this on my phone so it'll be a little light on research and punctuation. 

I thought I'd throw some thoughts about the Tulsa shooting out there. The basic story goes like this - a man ran from sheriff's deputies during a sting on a gun buy. One of the officers was a reserve deputy who is a citizen volunteer with the sheriff's department. Another deputy asked the volunteer to taze the suspect after two deputies had already wrestled him to the ground. The volunteer mistook his revolver for the taser and fired a round into the suspect. The volunteer immediately apologized. The suspect complained that he couldn't breathe, and a deputy said "fuck your breath." The suspect died. The reserve deputy has been arrested and charged with manslaughter. 

Where to begin...

The suspect was black and the reserve deputy was white. This could imply some racism, but I think everyone can acknowledge that the shooting was unintentional. But that's not quite right, either. 

The reserve deputy DID intend to shoot the suspect - he just didn't intend to use a gun. We seem to accept the use of a taser as an acceptable way to avoid death, but the taser itself is a deadly weapon. See http://m.livescience.com/36418-tasers-kill-cardiac-arrest-stun-gun.html

All that has to happen for a stun gun to kill is for that electricity to travel through the heart.  Just as it makes a subject's other muscles cease up, so to can it make the heart cease, causing cardiac arrest. A stun gun, like a bullet gun, should only be employed in an emergency, but its use by police is anything but. 

It is a way of inflicting violence at a distance that tricks its wielder into a false sense of safety - and that means it still holds all of the original prejudices and animosities under its surface. 

Now, I don't blame the shooter here, despite the fact that claims have been made that he lacked the requisite training. I think that's a false flag to the real problem. He did as he was told by an officer of the law, and had he not made a mistake, we'd never have heard about it. 

The deputies had the suspect on the ground, face-down. Rather than let him struggle and wear himself out, they opted to deploy their taser. It was unnecessary and potentially deadly even without a mistake, and that to me means they didn't respect the life of the suspect in the first place. 

They proved as much for their willful ignorance to his breathing pleas. 

That's where the systemic racism lies in this case, and what we desperately need to focus on to help prevent further abuses of power by our force. 

On a final side note - did anyone know that within a day a Sand Springs cop shot and killed a mentally ill man?  There's a real story there, too, but we've been ignoring it.