Police in South Florida shot an unarmed black caretaker Monday as he tried to help his autistic patient.
Charles Kinsey was trying to retrieve a young autistic man who had wandered away from an assisted living facility and was blocking traffic when Kinsey was shot by a North Miami police officer.
In cellphone footage of the incident that emerged Wednesday, Kinsey can be seen lying on the ground with his hands in the air, trying to calm the autistic man and defuse the situation seconds before he is shot.
“All he has is a toy truck in his hand,” Kinsey can be heard saying in the video as police officers with assault rifles hide behind telephone poles approximately 30 feet away.
“That’s all it is,” the caretaker says. “There is no need for guns.”
Seconds later, off camera, one of the officers fired his weapon three times.
A bullet tore through Kinsey’s right leg.
Kinsey said he was stunned by the shooting.
“I was thinking as long as I have my hands up … they’re not going to shoot me,” he told local television station WSVN from his hospital bed.
“Wow, was I wrong.”
Kinsey said he was even more stunned by what happened afterward, when police handcuffed him and left him bleeding on the pavement for “about 20 minutes.”
His attorney called the video “shocking.”
“There is no reason to fire your weapon at a man who has his hands up and is trying to help,” Hilton Napoleon told The Washington Post in a telephone interview Wednesday night.
Napoleon called for the department to fire the officer.

“You’re talking to someone whose dad was a police officer in the city of Detroit in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “I understand it. I had a fear when I was a child of whether or not my father was going to come home.
“But at the end of the day, we can’t use that as an excuse to allow police officers to shoot unarmed individuals,” he said. “Just like the police ask the community to not judge them based on … however many bad apples that are out there. In the same sense, they have to be able to hold themselves to the same standard and not hold the entire [black] community responsible for the incidents that happened in Dallas and Baton Rouge.”
Napoleon said he was already in negotiations with the City of North Miami regarding a possible settlement.
“I have confidence that the city is going to negotiate in good faith and try to resolve this issue,” he said. “At a minimum, we would request that they terminate the officer immediately based on what’s in the video.”
The attorney said he trusted the State Attorney’s Office, which is also investigating, to determine if criminal charges should be filed against the officer.

Quoted:
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