After the police in Tulsa, Okla., released video footage of an officer fatally shooting an unarmed man, and then standing back rather than tending to the man’s wounds, many people had the same reaction as a local activist, Marq Lewis, who voiced outrage that “they let him lay there two-plus minutes, bleeding.”

Anger at the treatment of the man, Terence Crutcher — not only his shooting last Friday, but also how officers behaved afterward — echoed concerns over other recent cases, mostly involving black males who died at the hands of the police. Notably, when Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy with a pellet gun, was shot to death in 2014 in a park in Cleveland, officers stood around for several minutes, waiting for an emergency medical team and offering no first aid.

So what should officers do? Experts in policing agree that the way officers respond, or fail to, is often a problem, but they say that such failures are not necessarily the fault of the officers, and that law enforcement agencies are starting to address them.

“It is reasonable for people to assume that when it is safe for the officers to do so, that they would render first aid to somebody they’ve just shot,” said Jim Bueermann, a former police chief who is president of the Police Foundation, a research group that advises law enforcement agencies. “But a lot of departments do not have policies that clearly articulate the officer’s responsibilities in that situation, and some have no policy at all.”