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posted by n1 on Friday July 22 2016, @11:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-shot-the-wrong-unarmed-man dept.

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


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 22 2016, @04:38PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 22 2016, @04:38PM (#378621)

    The police are as accountable for their actions as they ever were... it should be improving, but doesn't seem to be improving quickly enough to notice.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @09:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @09:29PM (#378792)

    Yes, but the quality of policing has taken a nosedive. Very few can lay claim to being peace officers, let alone public servants. Accountability is meaningless when you can't even reach a bare minimum standard.

    I honestly feel bad for the police. I doubt most of the officers intended to kill anyone, and they will have to have that on their conscious about how it all went wrong as well as being despised.

    It's plainly obvious something is broke in the contract between the governors and the governed, and no one really knows what is to be done about it.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 23 2016, @01:52AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday July 23 2016, @01:52AM (#378885)

      Again, I think the current news cycle is fanning the flames, but we've had cops shooting "innocent kids" more or less since cops got guns. We've had riots after cops are acquitted of manslaughter my whole life and then some, seems like every few years.

      There are plenty of "community servant" programs, improving relations, etc. You may not remember the 1960s when "the pigs" were enforcers for things like the draft, Kent State, etc. Most cops have risen above that adversarial role.

      With over 700,000 sworn officers on duty, it's a miracle there aren't "bad shoots" every week. It's like a soccer game with 300,000 attendees - by the odds, somebody's gonna die during the game, if it were a truly random cross sample, somebody out of 300,000 would die of old age within a few hours.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @03:22AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @03:22AM (#378898)

        It's a bit deeper than the occasional shooting.

        You have primarily minorities detailing their encounters with police, and it ain't pretty. It may be a small sampling but it's there, and it's prevalent enough to establish a pattern. The shootings are just the most egregious manifestations.

        While police have improved from the race riots in the 60s, were are almost to the point of having them again.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 23 2016, @09:09PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 23 2016, @09:09PM (#379164) Journal

    I disagree. Cops were being brought to heel, prior to 9/11/01, for various transgressions. Citizens groups, among other things, were demanding that the cops break off high speed pursuitst that led through neighborhoods. Then, the towers came tumbling down, and the cops no longer listened to citizens groups. Another issue involved the use of deadly force, in pursuit of a suspect. You know - the unarmed black male who gets shot in the back. Headway was being made, in some places, and then, 9/11.

    After the attacks on 9/11, law enforcement took a couple dozen long steps backward in the accountability department. And, the fearful among us were happy to see it. Better to kill dozens of innocent men, than to allow one terrorist to go free.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 23 2016, @09:54PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday July 23 2016, @09:54PM (#379175)

      See, I don't think the rules on high speed pursuit have been repealed, nor even the enforcement rate of those rules (which has never been 100%)... It's always been bad form to kill people, but, then again, around about 1998 or so an off duty cop in my neighborhood shot a petty thief, in the back as he was running away 100' down the sidewalk (in front of my back-door neighbor), there was a huge investigation, apparently the cop was fearing for his safety because the thief allegedly threw a brick through his window, so he ran out in the street and shot him as he ran away - he got 30 days off with pay and a letter in his file advising him not to do something like that again.

      Maybe your local perception is different, but mine is: the regulations are getting tighter, slowly, but overall "boys in blue will be boys in blue" and out of the nearly 1 million of them out there, once every few weeks one makes national news for screwing up. I think they're actually starting to calm down about being video taped - 10 years ago lots of them would go off the deep end if they thought a citizen might be recording them, still happens once in awhile, but not nearly as much as back then. All in all, I think the ubiquity of cell-phone video recording is making a larger percentage of bad stuff surface in the news, while the actual rate of "pigs in heat" is declining.

      Maybe it's because I'm aging and they treat me with more respect, but I've had a slow, steady decline of unpleasant encounters with law enforcement through the last 30 years.

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