Inquiry begins into Florida shooting
Authorities in Florida have launched an investigation into an incident earlier this week, partially captured on video, in which a police officer fired at a man who said his hands were empty and raised when he was shot.
While the actual shooting on Tuesday was not captured on camera, a recording shows that before any shots were fired, the man was lying on his back on the ground with his hands in the air, calling out that the man sitting near him was not holding any kind of weapon.
‘‘All he has is a toy truck in his hand,’’ Charles Kinsey, the man lying on his back, yells at two police officers standing behind telephone poles just a few dozen feet away on Northeast 14th Avenue. ‘‘That’s all it is. There is no need for guns.’’
Police said they only learned later that Kinsey worked at an assisted care facility and that the man sitting near him was autistic.
After the recording stopped, one of the officers fired three shots, hitting Kinsey at least once in his leg.
‘‘When it hit me, I’m like, I still got my hands in the air,’’ Kinsey, a black man, said in an interview from his hospital bed with local TV station WSVN.
Police have not said why the officer fired, though a police union representative said that the officer, who has not been identified and has been placed on administrative leave, was aiming for the autistic man – apparently thinking he was armed – and trying to protect Kinsey.
Kinsey said he was even more stunned by what happened afterwards, when police handcuffed him and left him bleeding on the pavement for ‘‘about 20 minutes.’’
According to Kinsey, the officer who fired the shots seemed confused by what happened. ‘‘‘Sir, why did you shoot me?’,’’ Kinsey recalled asking the officer. ‘‘He said, ‘I don’t know’.’’
In moments recorded during the encounter, Kinsey can be heard trying to calm the autistic man sitting next to him. The man, who was not identified, had apparently wandered away from a group home where Kinsey said he works as a behavioural therapist.
The recording, along with a second video taken after the gunshots and showing Kinsey and the autistic man being handcuffed, is the latest in a stream of violent encounters between police and black men captured on camera and propelled into national headlines.
It arrives as the United States is still on edge over issues of race and law enforcement. Recordings of fatal police encounters and their aftermaths in Louisiana and Minnesota earlier this month helped to revive protests over how law enforcement uses deadly force, while the deadly shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge have spurred further fears among officers over the threats they face on the job.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has launched an investigation.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-dade County, said that her office would carry out its own investigation to see if the shooting was a criminal act.