Today's Charlie Pierce

I hope this one's been on everybody's radar the last coupla days:

A rich donor to Tulsa police mistakenly pulled out his gun instead of his Taser and blasted a fleeing suspect.

The volunteer cop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who killed an unarmed black man was forking over thousands in donations and equipment after becoming an unpaid sheriff’s deputy.

Robert Bates, a 73-year-old insurance executive-turned-deputy, accidentally fired his gun instead of a Taser—costing Eric Harris, 44, his life and adding to the tally of deadly police shootings against minorities nationwide.

Recent update via Daily Beast:

The Tulsa deputy charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting an unarmed black man was the sheriff’s sugar daddy—treating him to exotic cruises and fishing trips—former officers with the sheriff’s department told The Daily Beast.

--and--

“Bob Bates came on board because he had all this money,” one former reserve deputy said, adding that the sheriff and other higher-ups would “go on these cruises in the Bahamas and in Mexico all the time.”

"[Bates] foots the bill,” the deputy added. “The sheriff just gave him free rein because he was treating him right. He bought his way into this position.”

Another former full-time deputy said Bates was “getting glad-handed” around the office because of his wealth.

“This is your typical Southern good ol’ boys system,” he said, adding that before the shooting Bates planned to take Glanz on a fishing trip to Florida.

In case anybody may still harbor the soul-crushingly stoopid notion that "Pay-To-Play-Citizen-Goon" is a good idea, here's Charlie Pierce:

Something has gone permanently squirrelly with law-enforcement in this country. There is the change in attitude by which police increasingly feel and behave like an occupying army in American cities. There is the preposterous increase in available armament. On a wider scale, there is the triumph at all levels of government of an attitude that we will not tax ourselves, ever, for anything, even our own safety. So we wind up with traffic cops who look on, ahem, certain citizens as resources to be pillaged, or we wind up with septuagenarian insurance salesmen empowered to shoot people in the street under color of law, because they were willing to buy guns and ammo privately for a public purpose. This is Kafka rewritten by Grover Norquist and Bozo The Clown. You get what you pay for, and we're not willing to pay for anything any more.