records shows bates had almost 300 showers of training since 2008. is he wellhe with well this excess of what you would anticipate someone would have meeting minimum requirements. reporter: but the sheriff acknowledged his office had not been able to find all of bates gun certification records since the instructor no longer worked there. we can t find the records that she supposedly turned in. so we ll talk to her to find out if for sure he did qualify with those. reporter: now citing mull will tip he will mulltiple sources, super virz ors were ordered to falsify training records and some who refused were transferred. the report has not been verified for nbc news. a spokesman says we don t respond to rumor. he got the training was signed off. that s the way it went. reporter: bates is charged
we ve been asking for these records for about a week and we still don t have we have summaries and have the actual records themselves. the sheriff s department going further than saying they can t find paperwork, they have rejected any claims that there was any falsification of any documents. they are calling into question your reporting. from the sheriff s department put out a statement saying this, keep in mind the tulsa world reporter cannot validate her sources and claims anonymity which leaves us skeptical that her claims are unsubstantiated and deceptive. that s coming from the sheriff s department. we reached out to the sheriff s department, asked them to come on. they declined to come on. i want to give you the opportunity to respond to that. sure, of course. the sheriff s department knowing we had this story did not want to comment yesterday. they have not produced the documents that could have made definitely made us
over the last few years. from your perspective, in your reporting and talking to your sources, do you think this was a pay to play being a cop scenario? that is a wildly held perception to everyone talking about this story. however, the flip side is donated equipment, donated cars, it is a big benefit to the department. they use it in undercover operations. that s a benefit. was he trained at 73 years old with only one year of law enforcement experience in his 60s, was he trained to go and do an undercover operation and be in this role? he said he s done 100 or so operations. i think a lot of people question whether he had the proper training to be in the position that he was in. let s see the records here. this is going to be important. eva, thank you for coming on and talking about your reporting.
this new report is important and potentially devastating because officials have claimed that bates had all the training he was supposed to. the newspaper also obtained copies of bates training records but records may not provide a full picture of his qualifications obviously because authenticity of the records are not being questioned. ryan young has more details on this. he s joining us now. ryan, what more are you learning? reporter: kate and john, a lot of people talking about this, obviously questions about 73-year-old man part of this detail. you look at this video, you can actually hear him scream taser taser taser. but instead of using that taser he used the firemen. there have been questions about his training since then. he s had a close wrelationship with this department. now claims about tulsa world talking about falsifying records, talking about three
harris haves. joining us to discuss this, one of the reporters who broke the story. let s be clear been, i said before, fully understand what you re reporting here, you re saying before this incident happened, potentially years before, they were people ordered to falsify the report. when they didn t, they were punished. that is correct. we have been told this by at least five sources and we have documents to corroborate this information. what we understand is that there are so-called field training officer records sort of in the field training that is supposed to be included and that there were not enough of those hours, that most of them actually didn t occur and deputy bates needed to have those hours and supervisors were ordered to just sign it. they refused. i don t know if you can say they were punished but they were transferred out to less desirable positions at least in the case of one of them. then the other issue was