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North Miami Police say they responded on July 20 to the area of Northeast 14th Avenue and Northeast 127th Street for a report of an armed man threatening suicide.
The "armed man" was a 23-year-old autistic patient who had wandered away from a nearby mental health center. He was sitting on the ground, playing with a toy truck.
47 year old behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey, a black man, was attending to the patient.
Multiple cops, armed with rifles, responded to the scene.
Kinsey was hit in the leg by one bullet. A photo shows Kinsey lying on his back with both hands in the air.
Speaking from his hospital bed Wednesday July 20 to a reporter for WSVN TV, Kinsey said "when it hit me I had my hands in the air, and I'm thinking I just got shot! And I'm saying, 'Sir, why did you shoot me?' and his words to me were, 'I don't know'."
The police administered no first aid. "They flipped me over, and I'm faced down in the ground, with cuffs on, waiting on the rescue squad to come", Kinsey said. "I'd say about 20, about 20 minutes it took the rescue squad to get there. And I was like, bleeding."
No gun was found at the scene.
At a Thursday July 21 press conference, the Miami-Dade Police Benevolent Association said the officer was a member of the SWAT team. The head of the PBA told reporters the officer was too far away to hear what Kinsey was saying before he fired.
Heavy.com Heavy.com with video
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956:
A Florida police officer shot and wounded an autistic man's black caretaker, authorities said, in an incident purportedly captured on cellphone video that shows the caretaker lying down with his arms raised before being shot.
Source: LA Times
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aclarke on Friday July 22 2016, @01:23PM
We have this quote from the police:
So they're basically saying, nonono we thought the WHITE guy was the baddie. We just accidentally shot the black guy, I dunno, because maybe our muscle memory is trained to shoot black people because the targets at the shooting range are black or something. Anyway, it was an accident.
Then after "accidentally" shooting the black guy, they cuff him and leave him on the ground for 20 minutes with no medical care. Is that how the police are supposed to treat an innocent person they accidentally shot?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 22 2016, @01:49PM
It's a simple calculus. The cops knew if they shot and cuffed the white guy, they might face consequences, whereas shooting, cuffing, beating, dragging down the street chained to a bumper, murdering the black guy outright would have no repercussions whatsoever.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @04:09PM
Unless there's a video. Then we shame the cops on social media.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Friday July 22 2016, @03:11PM
So basically he's saying "we meant to shoot the guy with autism"? I guess that was that the next best excuse he could think of after "I was aiming at the kitten".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday July 22 2016, @05:38PM
After reading about this and watching the video since yesterday, I actually buy that as a reasonably probable explanation for what happened. Here's why:
When the police decide to shoot a black citizen, they typically are already in a rather extreme fight-or-flight mode and they don't pussy-foot around. (Think about the way the officer who shot Philando Castille was still screaming at him afterwards to put his hands up after putting four rounds in the guy. He was seriously freaking the fuck out.) They typically open up multiple rounds center-mass, and at a range of 30 feet with a semi-automatic rifle I highly doubt Mr. Kinsey would still be around to tell his story if the officer had actually been aiming for him. He'd be dead. Instead, the officer fired three times and Kinsey only got hit once, in the leg. His legs were quite near the autistic white guy's body, and the autistic guy was sitting down cross-legged on the ground, so his center-mass was down low also. Depending on the angles between the two men and the officer firing the shots, it would be extremely easy to miss the white guy's body and accidentally shoot Mr. Kinsey in the leg.
Now we're left with, well why isn't the autistic white guy dead with at least those three rounds center-mass? Simple. He's white, and instead of being in fight-or-flight non-thinking mode fearing for his own life, the officer was only under mild stress because he thought that the black man on the scene might actually be killed by the obviously distraught white guy. So, instead of using his conditioned aim-center-mass instincts he's just kind of pussy-footing around with his aim and trying to just disable the white guy, who he thinks is the "shooter" in this scene. He's literally not being serious about trying to kill the white guy. This is the only apparent explanation how the autistic guy is still alive rather than having received three rifle rounds through the same eye socket, which anyone competent with a rifle at 30 feet should be able to do.
Of course none of this makes anything that happened OK. First off we have the police who place way too much stock in whatever the idiot on the phone told them to call them to the scene in the first place, which was that a disturbed person was wandering around in the street threatening to shoot themselves. So instead of retaining a low stress level and a functioning pre-frontal cortex that they can use to intelligently examine the situation for themselves, they operate the whole time as if they already understand what's happening, and believe there is a gun on the scene. You know, "err on the side of caution, shoot everyone who isn't wearing a badge, don't bother to think for yourself". Do they not have access to binoculars or a rifle scope? Any idiot should have been able to notice the object was not a firearm. The most obvious clue even from a distance was that it was white, and there are very few real firearms on the market that are painted white. You can already see that it's white in the blurry video.
Next we have the question of why we are opening fire with multiple rounds on someone who seems to be just upset and pointing a gun (toy truck) at himself. There was no shot fired (you can't open fire with a toy truck), so was it really necessary or prudent for the police to start shooting? This seems to be a fine example of the old adage, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." And of course this is an all too common response by our police forces to any citizen who seems disturbed or confused, which is why they keep shooting, tazing or beating to death people with disabilities rather than noticing that the person is confused and dealing with them more appropriately. Our police are conditioned to demand immediate and unconditional surrender to their authority, or they will happily escalate the situation to fatal consequences in a split second. Nothing about that should be acceptable.
And finally, there is this all too common bullshit of handcuffing everyone on the scene, including the guy you supposedly were trying to protect, while providing no medical assistance for an extended length of time. Numerous American citizens bleed out on the street in handcuffs every year after being shot by the police while multiple officers stand around with their collective thumbs up their asses talking amongst themselves, talking into their radios, and basically completely ignoring the person dying right in front of them. NOTHING about that should be acceptable to anyone, regardless of whether the shooting victim was actually committing a crime or not when they got shot. ABC, Airway-Breating-Circulation, this is literally the most basic medical training in existence, and they simply can't be bothered.
This situation at first seemed like yet another black man shot by police, but I think, as I've outlined above, that Mr. Kinsey really was shot by pure accident in this particular instance. Instead, I think this situation has highlighted many of the higher-level issues with police conditioning that lead to all the black citizens being shot in other situations, but also contributes to unacceptably bad outcomes in many different citizen encounters with police. Like this one, where we could have easily been reading about an autistic man being shot multiple times for the crime of holding a toy truck in public. Or, Mr. Kinsey could have easily bled out in the street even though he was shot only in the leg and by accident. Hit that femoral artery and you've got about three minutes to live. Don't worry, we'll get an ambulance on the scene in 45 minutes.
Long story short, we have major problems with how we train police in this country. They are basically conditioned to have the same mindset as soldiers on a battlefield, largely because of the pointless War on Drugs. Meanwhile, the police in the UK have killed 2 people so far this year. Two. That's one, plus one. Here the death toll should be around 600 citizens at this time of year. We do not have 300 times the population of the UK in this country. This is madness.
Of course, sadly, it goes without saying that if the autistic man, the one the police believed had a gun, had been black and his caretaker white, the autistic man would have been shot multiple times as soon as the police got on the scene. No talking, no yelling, no waiting, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, just blam blam blam, another dead black American. Mr. Kinsey is only alive because the police somehow miraculously understood that he was the one they were supposed to be protecting. We still have the racial bias problem in general. I am definitely not going to argue against that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Friday July 22 2016, @08:03PM
Replying to myself, because I forgot to include, in my already too-lengthy post above, that part of my reasoning was the very interesting (alleged) verbal response of the police officer to Mr. Kinsey. When Mr. Kinsey said, right after he realized he'd been shot in the leg, "Why did you shoot me, sir?" he claims the officer responded "I don't know." I believe the simplest explanation for this response is that the officer was caught off guard just enough in that moment to blurt out the literal truth: that he didn't know why Mr. Kinsey got hit, because he was in fact aiming at the other guy and half-heartedly attempting to save Mr. Kinsey's life from "the shooter" with the toy truck. It fits perfectly in the scenario I describe in the parent post.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ