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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @03:22PM
> Except he's going to have to explain how
Uh, yeah. Better for him to have to explain it in court than to come to court with a defense that doesn't even fit the special legal protections given to cops.
I feel like you are not hearing what I said - this is about maximizing his chances of winning in court. Just because it is his best hand to play doesn't necessarily make it a good hand, it just makes it better than all the other options available to him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @06:13PM
"Just because it is his best hand to play doesn't necessarily make it a good hand, it just makes it better than all the other options available to him."
Given the fact that cops are held to a much much lower standard than the rest of us there is a good chance this cop will be let off scot-free. Given their lower standard this is actually not such a bad argument. Oh, it would never work on a regular citizen in a million years but remember cops are not held to the same high standard as anyone else.
For example:
Ordinary citizens have been convicted of crimes with a lack of clear and unambiguous video footage. Yet I can't think of one example of this happening to an on duty police officer. Even with clear and unambiguous video footage it's still darn near impossible to convict an on duty police officer of anything. For every instance that such footage has been publicly released it's not hard to imagine there are many instances of misconduct that cops got away with only due to a lack of publicly released footage.
Every self respecting cop should be embarrassed at the fact that they are held to a lower standard than the rest of us. They should be ashamed of themselves that we consider them to be less than the rest of us. They should demand the honor of being held to a higher standard so that they can be considered better than the rest of us and not worse in need of special privileges to compensate for their inferior and often barbarian nature. If this cop gets off scot-free every self respecting cop should take that to be an insult to their profession. At the very least this is gross negligence on the part of the police officer.