Police shoot therapist tending autistic man
An investigation into the shooting of an unarmed black man as he lay on the ground with his hands in the air is being undertaken by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, North Miami’s police chief said on Thursday.
A cell phone video showed behavioural therapist Charles Kinsey with his hands extended above his chest moments before a bullet struck his leg. The shooting occurred in North Miami while Kinsey was trying to get an autistic man back to a nearby group home from which he had wandered.
Kinsey works at the home, which is operated by the Miami Achievement Center for the Developmentally Disabled.
Kinsey’s lawyer Hilton Napoleon of the firm Rasco Klock Perez & Nieto in Coral Gables, Florida, sent the video to Reuters on Thursday. Napoleon did not provide information about who had taken the video.
US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department was gathering information about the incident, the latest in a series of controversial shootings of black men by police in the United States.
Kinsey told Miami’s WSVN-TV that he was trying to calm the autistic patient when police showed up on Monday evening.
Kinsey, 47, said he dropped to the ground and lay on his back with his hands up and open to comply with commands from the police officers. ‘‘As long as I’ve got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking,’’ Kinsey said in an interview with WSVN-TV from his hospital bed on Wednesday. ‘‘Wow, was I wrong.’’
Kinsey said he kept his hands up throughout the incident and that he asked the officer, ‘‘Sir, why did you shoot me?‘‘ ‘‘He said, ‘I don’t know.’‘‘ Police said in a statement that the officers were responding to a 911 call about an armed man threatening suicide. They said the officer, who has not been identified, is on administrative leave according to standard procedures.
The shooting itself was not recorded, but in the video, which has been widely circulated on social media, Kinsey can be heard talking to his patient and police while lying flat in the street.
‘‘All he has is a toy trunk in his hands . . . I am a behaviour therapist at a group home,’’ Kinsey yelled in the video. He also urged his patient, who was sitting nearby, to lie down and be still.
The autistic man told him to ‘‘shut up’’ and did not comply.
The United States has seen demonstrations from coast to coast over the use of excessive force by police, especially toward black men.
Videos in the past year of some shootings or their aftermath in cities like North Charleston, South Carolina; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, have led to heightened calls for oversight of police.
The Baton Rouge and St. Paul shootings of black men were followed by attacks on police in Dallas and Baton Rouge in which eight officers were killed.
Police in North Miami have offered few details about the incident. Chief Eugene told reporters that officers responded to the scene with the threat of a gun in mind, but no gun was recovered.
‘‘There are many questions about what happened on Monday night,’’ he said. ‘‘I assure you we will get all the answers.’’ Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent a text to his entire country, urging people to remain on the streets as he tightens his grip on power after last Friday’s failed coup.
He issued the appeal on Wednesday night after announcing a three-month state of emergency that will enable him to bypass parliament in curbing press freedoms and the right to demonstrate. Huge rallies are continuing across the country every night, with an increasing air of hero worship for Erdogan.
‘‘Don’t give up on the resistance for your country, land and flag,’’ the text message, aimed at 68 million people in virtually every household in the country, read. ‘‘Resistance and the watch of democracy goes on to teach traitors and terrorists a lesson.’’
Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, was unimpressed. ‘‘It shows that he still feels insecure,’’ he said. ‘‘Keeping the masses on the streets is his ultimate survival instrument, and he is continuing to use it.’’ A similar text message sent on the night of the failed coup brought droves of people on to the streets to block the tanks.
The state of emergency boosts the president’s powers dramatically, but Erdogan said he wanted only to defend democracy. ‘‘The aim is to be able to take fast and effective steps,’’ he said.
Government sources insist the new measures will be applied only to those people believed to be connected to a movement run by the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen. He has denied involvement, but there is increasing evidence that his followers were at the core of the coup attempt.
However, there is concern that the government crackdown will undermine the stability of the country. More than 11,000 people in the military, judiciary, education system and police force have been arrested, and many times that number have been dismissed from their posts.
There have been chaotic scenes at the Caglayan courthouse in Istanbul where most of the soldiers accused of taking part in the coup have been charged. The court is working 24 hours a day to deal with the enormous number of suspects, who are being held in jail cells rather than military barracks for fear that they will be lynched by soldiers loyal to the government.
‘‘The families are having really hard times,’’ Nazli Tanburaci Altac, a defence lawyer, said. ‘‘There are some families who haven’t heard their son’s voice since Friday. Some of them call and ask, ‘Is he dead?’’’
The coup may have failed partly because some conspirators got cold feet, a source close to the investigation said on Thursday.