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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: 3, Informative) by Leebert on Friday July 22 2016, @02:42PM
For practical purposes, the probability of being shot by a police officer for no lawful reason is right down there with the probability of being killed by a terrorist, and way below the probability of dying in a car accident. It's just not worth worrying about, especially if you aren't black or latino and/or you spend your time outside of heavily populated areas (come and visit our national parks!). All things considered, it's a relatively rare occurrence relative to any number of bad things that could happen.
The very fact that there is such an outrage over this is, IMO, is a healthy sign that a large part of the citizenry finds this unacceptable and is pushing to rectify the problem instead of just ignoring it.
That said, I had a bunch of spent 5.56 shell casings rolling around in the bed of my pickup that I recently got around to clearing out *just* in case... No sense in giving someone an excuse to claim they thought I had a gun.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday July 22 2016, @04:32PM
I don't recall the last time someone was killed by a terrorist in Minnesota.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Friday July 22 2016, @04:47PM
Not sure what that has to do with anything, but OK...?
(Score: 1) by LT218 on Friday July 22 2016, @06:15PM
Do you really need someone to connect those dots for you?
His point is, according to some quick Googling, it would seem that there are an average of 10 fatalities per year resulting from encounters with the police in Minnesota the last few years. It also appears that there has been zero (or very close to it) terrorist attack related deaths in Minnesota in same time frame.
Thus, in Minnesota, your chances of being killed by the police are several orders of magnitude higher than being killed by a terrorist attack.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Leebert on Friday July 22 2016, @06:37PM
I still don't understand what that has to do with my original comment. Re-reading my comment, it seems pretty clear to me that I was speaking on a national level in response to a person who was avoiding the entire country for fear of an unjustified deadly law enforcement encounter. Aside from the fact that I specifically referred to unlawful shootings (not all police shootings are unjustified), I made no claim that unjustified police shootings are uniformly distributed throughout the country.
I haven't looked up the numbers but I'm reasonably sure that I could counter with exactly the same argument about the likelihood of dying from a terrorist attack in Oklahoma City being far higher than the likelihood of being the victim of an unlawful police shooting. That wasn't my point.
If anything, the fact that we are having this conversation where a few major events (terrorist attacks) or a minority of problematic law enforcement agencies can skew the numbers so much in a single geographic region reinforces my point: While both are certainly problems that need to be dealt with, both are still relatively rare occurrences, and not something worth avoiding the country entirely over.
It also doesn't mean I don't think that both are problems that we need to work to solve. In fact, I think the misbehaving law enforcement problem is much easier to solve, and I believe that we will make great strides toward the solution in the near future. Which really means something coming from a cynic such as myself.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 22 2016, @06:50PM
I'm guessing it has to do with your statement that "the probability of being shot by a police officer for no lawful reason is right down there with the probability of being killed by a terrorist." Out of curiosity I found some statistics; killings by police may exceed those by terrorists by roughly a factor of 4.
Pro Publica looked into killings by police:
-- http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/young-black-males-21-times-more-likely-be-shot-police-whites [alternet.org]
According to a report by the National Counterterrorism Center [archive.org], "Seventeen U.S. private citizens worldwide were killed by terrorist attacks in 2011. These deaths occurred in Afghanistan (15), Jerusalem (1), and Iraq (1)." In 2006, [state.gov] 28 were killed. In 2007, [state.gov] 19 were killed.
A report [umd.edu] by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism says
It appears to me that, taking into account the 9-11 attacks, several times more Americans are killed by police than by terrorists. Naively I calculate 3500/40=88 and 12000/33=364 which differ by a factor of four. I've underestimated the killings by terrorists by not including the killings outside the United States. I've underestimated the killings by police because not all police departments report such killings.
Actions were undertaken to avoid a repetition of the 9-11 attacks; actions have been taken to reduce deaths in car crashes. Action to attempt to reduce killings by police may also be appropriate.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday July 22 2016, @06:59PM
If we're gong to include terrorist killings outside he US, then shouldn't we also include police killings outside the US? But thank you for putting numbers to my assumptions. It confirms that I have much more to fear from police in my home state than from terrorists.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 22 2016, @07:34PM
The figures I gave for terrorist killings outside the United States are just for Americans who were killed while abroad otherwise than in a governmental capacity. I didn't include them in my simplistic calculation.
Channel 4 compared information on deaths at the hands of police in a few countries. In South Africa, 556 people were shot dead in 1 or 2 years, a higher rate per capita than in the United States; in 18 years, Swedish police shot 18 people dead.
http://www.channel4.com/news/police-fatal-shooting-trigger-happy-fact-check [channel4.com]
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Friday July 22 2016, @07:20PM
Thanks for the comprehensive response.
It seems that those numbers are inclusive of *all* police killings. I think it's fair to say that most of those were probably justified; my comment (which you quoted) specifically included the qualification "for no lawful reason". (Which, I now concede, could have been better termed "unjustified", but that's more of an editorial difference.)
Since you've acknowledged that we're in "back of the envelope" land, I'll just go with your numbers, even though I think we would both acknowledge that those numbers are skewed from the inclusion of justified shootings and the exclusion of unreported shootings.
Going with your annual occurrence of 364 police shootings, with a population of about 324,000,000 (per the US Census Clock), you're talking about, literally, an almost one-in-a-million chance of having it happen to you. Compared to a one in 2.75ish million chance of being killed in a terrorist attack.
My point still stands: Compared to the myriad other bad things that can happen to you, neither terrorism nor unjust police shootings should be the thing that deters someone from visiting the US. They're both so improbable it's not worth worrying about when considering a visit to the US; just like arguing if you need to worry more about being attacked by a shark or being struck by lightning.
No disagreement here; as I have noted elsewhere, I think that we *do* have a problem, and we *should* address the problem. In fact, I believe that addressing the law enforcement problem is much easier than addressing either of the other two.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 22 2016, @08:51PM
I did indeed disregard the qualification "for no lawful reason." That was inadvertent.
Perhaps there are other instances of which I'm ignorant, but I'm only aware of one killing by police [wikipedia.org] in the United States that was formally deemed unlawful in the sense that criminal charges were filed and the officer was found guilty. Is that the meaning you intended? If so I acknowledge that such killings are extremely rare--far more rare than deaths from lightning or sharks--yet events such as the one in the story make me hesitate to conclude that being stopped by police is relatively safe. The police have de jure limited immunity and there's an appearance of de facto impunity.
About those FBI statistics I provided, I now see that there's an estimate that they understate the true figures by a factor of two: a 2015 Department of Justice report [bjs.gov] concluded that
The Pro Publica report I mentioned highlighted a risk to young, black men, whom it said were being killed by police at the rate of 31.2 deaths per million men, as compared to 1.47 per million for white men in the same age range.
Somehow I also disregarded the fact that you were discussing travellers visiting the United States. I won't claim that any of these figures might pertain to them. The Bahamas famously issued an advisory [jonesbahamas.com] about travel to the United States.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Saturday July 23 2016, @04:21AM
Your confusion is why I acknowledged that "unjustified" was probably a better term. My intent was to convey that only a subset of police shootings are unjustified. Few people, I believe, would disagree that a law enforcement officer is well within their rights and duties to shoot and kill an individual who is an imminent mortal threat to others, and that's a lot of police shootings (probably the majority of them, but that's just a random guess). I don't think "unlawful" wasn't the wrong term, but it was a confusing term. Unjustified shootings are not lawful, regardless of whether the shooter is held accountable. If I commit an unlawful act but am not charged or acquitted, it doesn't change the fact that I committed an unlawful act. It just means I got away with it.
Anyway, I think the point has been sufficiently well hashed. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @05:22PM
A random black man killed by a Klansman.
Or a Klansman killer by a Panther.
Either/or/both.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Friday July 22 2016, @07:40PM
I understand your point. However, it's also a problem of perception for me. I feel like any cop (and it feels like there are many in the US) could blow a gasket in any random situation and that bad things could happen. I am most likely wrong. But my problem is that I can't tell.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Friday July 22 2016, @07:52PM
No, no, you're exactly right. Unless you know the cop personally and have reason to trust him, any given random cop *could* be one of the bad guys who might blow a gasket in a random situation and make bad things happen to you. I'm just pointing out that the probability of it happening is actually very low. Like, one-in-a-million low (or lower if you're not black or Latino), and thus not worth worrying about if you're deciding whether to visit or not.
I understand how you feel, of course. I visit Haiti every so often and I always have this nagging feeling of uneasiness whenever I do, even though I know objectively that the likelihood of me being kidnapped and held for ransom is quite small. The human brain has powerful danger avoidance mechanisms that tend to overreact, and it's hard to shut down with your logical brain.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday July 22 2016, @08:47PM
It's not just being shot that you have to worry about. It's being arrested for no reason, being subjected to illegal searches, being beaten for no reason, etc. Getting shot is one of the worst things that can happen to you, but it's by no means the only thing that can happen.