Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist who was trying to help an autistic patient who had wandered away from a group home, did everything right when confronted by cops with guns drawn. He got shot anyway:
New video shows moments before @NorthMiamiPD shot unarmed man with hands in air: https://t.co/YbXRNBaDVR @BrianEntin https://t.co/UKHHIYd00z
— WSVN 7 News (@wsvn) July 20, 2016
Luckily, Mr. Kinsey is expected to make a full recovery. The cops were responding to a 911 call about an agitated, armed man threatening suicide. The man was the group home patient, and the “weapon” was a toy truck. Kinsey said he was more worried about his patient than himself, but Kinsey is the one who ended up shot in the street.
The people who minimize the problem of police violence against unarmed citizens — specifically black male citizens — will point out that the video doesn’t show the shooting. That’s true; it doesn’t.
First it shows Kinsey lying in the street with his hands up, calmly explaining who he is, what he is doing there and stating that neither he nor his patient are armed. Then it shows him handcuffed and bleeding from a gunshot wound.
I guess we’re supposed to believe that Kinsey attempted to ninja the cops during the video break. Such bullshit.
hovercraft
Jabba out
scav
Well, the entire nation hasn’t been properly deferential to the police, haven’t contributed enough so, well, that protect and serve nonsense just isn’t operative right at the moment. That cop could feel someone, somewhere, disrespecting him. Examples must be made.
Shygetz
Has there been any explanation of why it doesn’t show the shooting?
Dadadadadadada
If I were the commanding officer of the shooter, I would want his (the shooter’s) hide stapled to the wall of my office by midnight. A moment like this, and he pulls a stunt like that…
Betty Cracker
@Shygetz: Not that I’ve seen. But if I was filming a confrontation and bullets started flying, I’d probably drop my damn phone. Maybe that’s what happened.
Dadadadadadada
@Shygetz: @Shygetz: Apparently the guy holding the camera thought the incident was over, since nothing was happening. He tuned back in once the shooting started.
Rich Gardner
Reminds me of the shooting of John Crawford III in a Wal-Mart in 2014. The police “went in hot” and didn’t stop to check if the initial report was accurate.
dedc79
If someone is threatening suicide, why the hell would you point a weapon at them in the first place?
SiubhanDuinne
I haven’t watched the video, and won’t. I do not enjoy seeing violence visited upon anyone, in the movies or in real life. The still image, and reading about it, is plenty for me. This is insanely awful.
And O/T, but was the site wonky for the past half hour or so, or was it just me? Couldn’t access BJ on either my iPad or phone.
scav
@Betty Cracker: Or, one stops because there seems to be no damn reason for anyone to actually get shot, it’s all just a temporary misunderstanding. Probably a heuristic that should be unlearned.
lamh35
So he was trying to hit the autistic guy instead…what fucked up reasoning is that!!!
“NEW: Police union: Officer was trying to shoot other man, not #CharlesKinsey; thought man was armed and Kinsey’s life was in danger”
Miss Bianca
@dedc79: Assisted suicide?
@SiubhanDuinne: ’twasn’t just you. Site was wonky. Not policy-wonky, just wonky.
japa21
@SiubhanDuinne: I had same problem on my lap top. Figured it was Trump trying some sabotage prior to his speech.
Mary G
@SiubhanDuinne: It wouldn’t load for me, either.
dr. bloor
@lamh35: FOP guy was trying to make the point that the cop wasn’t some rage-filled racist, but simply confused and a lousy shot to boot. Go with what you have, I suppose.
japa21
@lamh35: Great, except that doesn’t explain why they handcuffed Kinsey, Plus, when Kinsey asked the officer why he shot him, according to Kinsey the answer was “I don’t know.”
kindness
If only one video came out showing (white) cops shooting a white person who didn’t deserve it, then conservatives might be able to stand on a soap box and shout bullshit. But they aren’t. They are shooting minorities under circumstances they would never shoot a white person.
Damn! They’re blowing it. At the very least you would expect them to blame Obama or Hillary.
hovercraft
@SiubhanDuinne:
Not just you.
Mike J
@lamh35:
Which doesn’t explain why they handcuffed and denied first aid to the guy they did shoot.
dr. bloor
@japa21: Well, it is easier to cuff a guy who’s bleeding out on the street than an autistic guy armed with a toy truck…
Dadadadadadada
@SiubhanDuinne: I had the same problem. I thought Cleveland had finally erupted and caused a surge in traffic here.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@dedc79: They’re trying to help. They’re just a little unclear on the concept of “help”.
Mary G
@scav: Because a toy truck looks so much like a gun, uh huh.
gwangung
@dr. bloor: Yeah? So? He was trained to handle incidents and he fucked up. Big time.
And untrained civilians are supposed to act perfectly or they’ll get the blame (and the bullet)….
Lowtechcyclist
And I will continue to bring up the fact that there is less reason than ever for cops to have itchy trigger fingers. Because even with the recent shootings, this is still a safer time to be a cop than almost any time in the past 120 years.
Amir Khalid
@SiubhanDuinne:
I had that problem too. It seems to have been some https glitch. Not the first one we’ve had, if so. At first I thought some frontpager here had posted about the 1MDB scandal. Quite a few Malaysian online news sites (non-mainstream media) have been giving me 404 errors when I try to go there, IYKWIM.
MattF
@lamh35: So many things wrong there. Good news is that no one was killed.
Eric U.
this hits very close to home since my brother is autistic and his caretakers are all black. Cops need to stand down, it’s just outrageous. Can’t keep your finger off the trigger? Keep your gun in its holster until you need it.
dr. bloor
@gwangung: Uh, yeah. I’m not defending anybody here.
Dadadadadadada
@dedc79: An armed suicidal person might suddenly turn the weapon on other people. In such a case you would need to put him down. So the armed response isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But it certainly appears that at least several people (Kinsey himself certainly not included) really, really screwed the pooch here.
scav
@Mike J: Let alone why the threatened guy was being compliant and attempting to explain the situation. Clearly the toy truck was a mind control device of some type.
hovercraft
@dr. bloor:
My question is if the situation was reversed and a confused panicked autistic person shot a cop, what would the FOP’s reaction be. Why must we always give the cop the benefit of the doubt?
Roger Moore
@lamh35:
So he’s not just trigger happy, he’s such a bad shot that innocent bystanders are any time he shoots.
japa21
@kindness: There have been some shootings of white people in situations where it wasn’t remotely called for. Interestingly, the Wisconsin law that requires an independent investigation of all police shootings was the direct result of one such case. However, from a proportional point of view, there is little doubt that POC are targeted far more frequently.
The Ancient Randonneur
We have a law enforcement crisis in this country. The police unions, militarization of the force, and the thin blue line are all part of the problem. Until those issues are addressed more citizens (most of them people of color) will suffer at the hands of the very people sworn to protect and serve.
Dadadadadadada
@Roger Moore: And it’s not like it was a hard shot, either; taken with a rifle, from a stable position inside 50 yards, likely at a stationary target…
hovercraft
@Mike J:
There is always the danger that, the wounded bleeding handcuffed black man will leap up and kill the cops surrounding him, so it’s best to wait awhile just to be on the safe side, those bucks are very strong.
Emma
@dr. bloor: So he wasn’t trying to shoot the black man, he was trying to shoot the sick man? Because he couldn’t tell the difference between a toy truck and a gun?
And here I was hoping Miami could, for once, escape its tendency to flash ass.
Roger Moore
@kindness:
Not entirely true. They’re shooting minorities under circumstances where they would be a lot less likely to shoot a white person, but having the right skin color is not 100% protection. There’s a case going on in Fresno right now that involved the police shooting a white kid for no good reason. It’s causing confusion because both white bigots and BLM activists are trying to make something out of the case.
Brent
I feel like “did everything right” should be in quotes. None of us should be required to follow some ultra-specific protocol in our interactions with LEO, especially when we are unarmed and have presented no probable cause that we are a threat to anyone or anything. Its the responsibility of the trained LE professional acting in his/her role as a public servant to make a reasonable assessment of risk and behave accordingly. If they fail at that because the person they are approaching hasn’t conformed to some precise protocol, then the failure to “do everything right” belongs to the professional who has been vested with a monopoly on the legal use of violence.
Of course, everyone makes mistakes. But the persistent notion that citizens are the ones most culpable for preventing those mistakes is that part of this whole debate that annoys me the most.
sukabi
@dr. bloor: since when is “We employ morons.” an explanation?
dedc79
I felt like I needed to do something more than complain on facebook/blogs/twitter after the latest spate of shootings, so I wrote my local (washington dc) police department to express my concern about treatment of minorities and to ask what practices they were adopting to ensure that similar tragedies don’t occur in the District. Today I received this response:
SiubhanDuinne
@Miss Bianca, @japa21, @Mary G, @hovercraft, @dadadadadadada, @Amir Khalid:
Thank you all for reassuring me. One of my less attractive attributes is the willingness — nay, eagerness! — to believe deep inside that any technological thing that goes wrong is Totally My Fault.
RK
You guys obviously don’t know about the “I’m on my back, hands up, legs spread, but gun in my ass trick.” Naive people here.
rikyrah
Thank you for calling him what he is : a therapist.
A whole lot of the MSM is calling him a “caretaker “.
Phuck.outta.here
Brachiator
@Dadadadadadada:
Bullshit. Most armed suicidal people stay indoors and either shoot themselves or don’t.
scav
@sukabi: Seemed to work for department of Officer Loehmann.
elm
The CNN headline on this was “Miami shooting: Man says cops shot him while he was lying down with hands up”.
Instead of bothering to watch the video and see what actually happened, they just phrase it as a claim. “Man says X”.
? Martin
So, the officer shot at a stationary, compliant target 3 times, missed twice, hit the wrong guy the last time, then cuffed the wrong guy who they now claim they thought was the victim.
Uh huh.
sukabi
@scav: unfortunately it works way too often…in fact the higher up you go, the more likely your moronic behavior will get you promoted, bonuses,ect. And if youre incompentent enough to the point of ruining a company you’ll get paid MILLIONS to leave the building.
Meritocracymoronocracy at its finest.CONGRATULATIONS!
@? Martin: You REALLY gotta want to believe that cops are incapable of doing any wrong whatsoever to swallow that horseshit.
Brachiator
Goddam there are all kinds of things wrong with this incident that blows up from the baseline “living while black” dilemma.
I wonder who the fuck called in the incident and what they saw that led them to a conclusion that a “suicidal” person had a gun.
Thank goodness that the therapist ultimately was able to prevent the autistic person from being harmed.
The cops should have been there to assist the therapist. There is something hugely wrong in many situations where the police are called out to deal with someone who has mental or developmental problems. There are apparently huge gaps in police training that they do not know how to identify a person with mental problems, especially a person who may not comprehend or be able to comply with police instructions.
If the therapist had not been present, the police would have posed a greater risk to the autistic person.
Some dumbass might say that the cops did not know whether the situation was a “trap.” They were afraid to approach the two men. If the therapist said that he was a goddam therapist, the cops should have had him come to them with his hands up and looked at any ID that he had with him. And then let the therapist do his goddam job.
Bottom line: what seems to be the standard, consider a person to be a suspect based on an uninformed call, and then presume that you must disarm or potentially shoot a “suspect” is insane. These dope cops did not seem to be able to make an independent judgement of what they were facing.
The cops by their stupidity, became a threat to the black man and his patient as soon as they showed up.
OzarkHillbilly
@Brachiator:
Undoubtedly so, but completely beside the point when armed suicidal persons don’t and that does happen from time to time.
? Martin
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Or just believe that black people deserve to be shot just on principle.
laura
Fear of the black man is reinforced continuously. I don’t think the culture can accept the idea of a black male be they child, teen, young man or adult as anything other than an unspecified threat.
It is a shameful disgusting and self-perpetuating stereotype and any effort to have communities come together for healing has not been tolerated by the powers that be.
Cointelpro is instructive in this regard.
Fred Hampton is the origin story for my younger years.
Mike in NC
We went to the farmers’ market this morning in our tiny boring seaside town. A couple of cops showed up to monitor traffic/direct parking and they were wearing Kevlar vests!
p.a.
“That’s no ordinary
rabbitTonka Truck. Thatrabbit’sTonka Truck’s a killer!”I’m only trying some levity because the proper response is to break things. At least there’s a survivor this time.
Trollhattan
What happened to “an armed society is a polite society?” Cops now evidently expect EVERYONE to be armed and treat them as such. Black folks all assumed to have two guns, minimum, because Obama. A Gordian knot I have no clue how to untangle.
Sans video I wonder what they’d be saying?
Mnemosyne
@gwangung:
This, and also what Brent said. Shouldn’t the people who supposedly have actual training in how to de-escalate dangerous situations be held responsible when those situations go wrong and not the untrained, possibly irrational people they interact with?
Of course, part of the problem here is that “police training” in the US can range from almost a year at police academy to here’s a badge and a gun, and here’s how you turn on the siren.
I will say once again, if we can have a nationwide Common Core to educate our schoolchildren, why can’t we have one to educate our cops?
gorram
Why on earth would the police respond to a suicide by shooting someone?
They have lost their marbles when it comes to any Black person with any pretext, ugh.
Brachiator
@OzarkHillbilly:
As I noted in another comment here, the main thing is that the original call misidentified the situation, and there is an ongoing problem with how the police can best identify a person who is distraught or mentally ill or mentally challenged and who may be physically or psychologically incapable of obeying police demands, but who actually poses no threat to the officers.
So, fundamentally, the example of an armed suicidal person is not really an issue.
But even here, an armed suicidal person may be more like a person standing on the ledge of a building. They are more a threat to themselves than to the officers. And the basic issue is how to stabilize the situation with a distraught person.
Keith G
@Brachiator:
I think it is more appropriate for a sergeant to carefully walk up (firearm holstered) to the to the man who turned out to be a therapist and assess the situation. It is a chicken shit group of officers who cower behind a vehicle with guns drawn in such a situation.
Chicken shit boys in blue.
encephalopath
My guess is that Kinsey took the toy truck away from the autistic person to the police wouldn’t shoot him for being uncooperative, then the cops shot Kinsey.
I was watching this last week’s episode of Unreal where the cops shoot a black man at a traffic stop and then go check on him and try to render aid. I said to myself and my ladyfriend, “No that’s not what they would do. They would just let him lie there an wait for EMS to arrive.” Because that’s exactly what they do.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Which seems like a common thread to a number of these shootings. The police get an incorrect report, go in expecting violence, and wind up shooting somebody without first bothering to appraise the situation themselves. It demonstrates poor training, leadership, or both. In any case, it shows that these shootings are a result of system-wide problems, not just malicious or incompetent individual police officers.
Dave
@Mnemosyne: What always gets me is the failure to render aid that occurs in these. Fine lets say you haven an overdeveloped sense of fear and are a stewing mess of biases that is nonetheless trying to do the right thing. And lets set compassion for the officer to maximum for this and accept that criminal charges shouldn’t be forthcoming. Well at the minimum you should have a desk job from now until the retirement that you are generously allowed to keep. You certainly have proven you have no business wielding a firearm and making life and death decisions for others (and ethically if you accept the power to make those decisions you should damn well accept the consequences of poor ones) and probably shouldn’t work as on officer anymore. What moves events like this from negligent cockups and unexamined biases and poor judgment to morally reprehensible is the refusal to render aid. The officer doesn’t know why he shot his victim admits that and leaves him to possibly bleed out. There is a point where events move from you are a dumbass that has no buisness in the filed to morally reprehensible and the point where you fail to render aid is the point where you can’t even fudge this.
And yet people will make that excuse. They will demonize children like Tamir Rice to avoid that judgment it sickens me. In Afghanistan quite of few of the people that died fighting us were teenagers not much older than Tamir and even though they were attacking us I felt for them. Kids that know nothing being sacrificed (and then I looked at our young ones and saw the same) I remembered that in combat I have no sympathy for officers that screw up and then double down. I’m not sure that my point wasn’t lost here this shit gets me emotional and the excuse making is alternatively maddening and disheartening.
Dave
@Roger Moore: I agree with this. And it’s the refusal to render aid that sends these from tragic to morally contemptible and draw hard criticism from me.
Brachiator
@Keith G: RE: If the therapist said that he was a goddam therapist, the cops should have had him come to them with his hands up and looked at any ID that he had with him. And then let the therapist do his goddam job.
Works for me, too.
The main thing is that the person who was most vulnerable and most at risk was the autistic man. He might have done something that might have been misinterpreted out of fear, uncertainty, etc. The therapist was tending to him. The cops needed a way to accurately reassess the situation and let the therapist do what he was trained to do.
The ignorant, racist assumptions about the therapist compounded all the problems. The goddam therapist was trying to protect and serve, and clearly was not simply trying to prove that he was no danger to anyone, but also clearly trying to keep his patient out of harm’s way.
And then you had the dumbass cops, who seemed to have no clear plan to do anything other than shoot a black guy. It’s as though they even forgot the original call, “suicidal man with a gun” and only saw “dangerous black man. something something something.”
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Unfortunately, you must also include malice and incompetence.
Some cops are unable to see blacks (and often as well) Latinos as human beings. They hear the therapist say “I’m his therapist.” They even hear him say that what the autistic man has is an innocent toy.
But they cannot see the black man as anything but a potential threat. They see a potentially malignant Other. This is more than an issue of systems and training.
Brent
@encephalopath:
Well that is certainly not the scenario that Kinsey described, and given what we are able to see of his behavior on the video before the shooting started, I doubt his behavior changed so drastically when the video was not rolling (and that he then decided to lie about it).
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@dedc79:
They thought it was someone with a gun who wanted to die, likely thought the suspect didn’t mind taking a cop with them.
That said; Cops got the suspects under control and they still shoot; Racism or sheer incompetence, what’s the difference?
encephalopath
@Brent:
I didn’t actually read anything that he said about the shooting. I did nothing but wildassguessing there.
EBT
Most police officers have to still make target shooting minimums right? This shooting right here should be all anyone needs to investigate who faked his for him.
Brent
@encephalopath:
Ah, well its quite something really. On the video, you can hear Kinsey yelling out that the autistic man is holding a toy and pleading with the police not to shoot. He says he stayed in the position you see him in on the video, flat on his back with his arms up in the air, when he was shot. His description of the shooting would almost be comical in its understatement if it weren’t such a grim testament to the way these scenarios so often play out:
In the aftermath, when the officer came over to him (to cuff him and detain an unarmed man that he had just shot) he asked: “Why did you shoot me?” The reply, according to Kinsey: “I don’t know”
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
And it’s a systematic problem that they’re still on the force. I’m not expecting the police to be 100% effective at finding and removing bigots, but the available evidence says that plenty of places aren’t even trying, or are actively recruiting them.
Barb2
The cop selection process is badly flawed.
So whoever selected that crazy cop should be fired.
It’s bad enough that an unarmed therapist with his arms up was dhot, now the enabling guys in the cop shop tell us that the intellectually handicapped person with a toy truck was the real target? Idiot cops and their lies always make it worse.
All cops need to be reevaluated and the racist ones must be removed.
We are seeing yet another case of the “magical_negro_trope” – the victim is hand cuffed and no first aid rendered – because.
Something needs to be done about racist 911 callers.
Joyce H
I have a suggestion that we need to start circulating. I propose that states pass a Nervous Cop law. The NC law states that any policeman who shoots or shoots at an unarmed person for any reason is immediately terminated as temperamentally unsuited for police work, that any person terminated under the NC law provisions is barred from employment at any other police department or employment as an armed security guard.
I think cops would be a lot more careful about when they fire their weapons if they knew that shooting at a person who turned out to be unarmed would result in them losing their job and being unable to find further employment in their field. In cases where death results and/or there is egregious error or negligence, the policeman would also be liable for criminal charges, but the NC law would mandate the termination and the police unions would have no recourse.
I know that a lot of these cases really ought to result in the cops going to jail, but those convictions are hard to get, and it seems like when the cops aren’t convicted, they wind up right back on the job. Let’s at least get them out of uniform and take their guns away.
Ohio Mom
One of the contributors at the Reality-Based Community blog, Harold Pollack, recently wrote a post recently about police killing people with disabilities and mental illness when called by their families and/or their caretakers to help when the person with the disability or illness is having (as we in the biz sometimes call it) “behaviors.” It happens more often that you might think.
Harold’s wife Veronica’s brother, Vincent, has Fragile X Syndrome (the most frequent cause of Intellectual Disability, the condition formerly known as Mental Retardation), and he ends the post with this story:
“Veronica and I were sitting at breakfast one morning. She was reading a Tribune story about a mentally ill young man who was shot and killed by police called to the family home. Veronica looked up and calmly stated: “I don’t care what Vincent is doing. Never call the police.” We have no particular reason to believe we’ll need to make that call. I just wish we had greater confidence in what would happen if we ever did.”
For me, the mother of a teen with autism, the moral of what happened in Florida is that many police are so, so ready to shot Black men that it is the one time they forego shooting at the disabled person.
Anyway, very happy that Mr. Kinsey survived!
burnspbesq
@lamh35:
A “decorated SWAT veteran” misses by a couple of feet from close range. On top of everything else wrong about this deal …
mere mortal
Someone called 911, and when the police arrived, they found a black man and a latino man, one of whom had severe autism.
At that point, it was inevitable that someone was going to be shot.
Paul in KY
@dedc79: Can’t get a kill on your accomplishments list if the perp is gonna shoot themselves.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: A lot of them (IMO) want violence. Makes the day go faster, etc.
janinedm
@Shygetz: I’ve read at least a dozen articles about this so I can’t remember which one said this, but one of them said that they thought the incident was coming to a close and was pretty much resolving.