Thank Og the guy is alive and appears to be recovering well (based on the video). It’s going to be a long, long road to fixing this problem…
Nothing in the forsensics is incompatible with witness testimony that Brown was shot by a cop out for revenge as opposed to a cop shooting in self-defense.
The video of Walter Scott’s shooting in SC showed that cops are not above staging a scene so that evidence conveniently lines up with their lies. it would have taken very little effort for Brown to have been set up the same way.
To quote a veteran elsewhere:
“I was in Iraq & even in an actual theater of war, unless you were immediately fired on we had several steps to go through before kill shots. We had rules of engagement and escalation of force cards my command made us carry on us at all times with those regulations. Even when a car possibly carrying explosives was barreling down on us, we were taught to exhaust several steps of warnings before killing: hand signals, flags pop smoke/flares, warning shots to the sides, disabling shots THEN kill shots. So for the life of me, I can’t figure out why on the streets of the United States of America police officers go immediately to murder and people are just like “Well, in the heat of the moment…””
Can’t see why the officers at the scene wouldn’t have know this. The video shows that Kinsey was yelling out that the other guy was autistic and unarmed and what he was holding in his hand was a toy truck. I suppose Kinsey in retrospect should have also yelled “And I’m the supposed hostage here so you shouldn’t shoot me.” but I guess he mistakenly assumed the police knew that.
The police claim they couldn’t understand what he was saying because they were too far away. Which is bullshit. The guy filming everything was no closer to the two than the cops were, and yet you can clearly hear what Kinsey was communicating. And phones are notorious for having poor reception There was also a witness on the scene who told the cops that the autistic guy was unarmed. So they are full of shit to deny they were informed.
And moreover, if they couldn’t hear what Kinsey was saying, that’s all the more reason to hold fire. Assuming they are telling the truth and they were completely blind and deaf to what was happening, the therapist could have been shouting “HE HAS A BOMB! PLEASE DON’T SHOOT” and they wouldn’t have known at all. How is shooting at anyone in this situation proper procedure?
Also, it bothers me that Rivera pointed out that the autistic guy is white. As if to communicate, “We were aiming for the white guy, not the black one. So let’s not make it a Black Lives Matter thing, okay?”
But only in relation to shooting black people.
The entire justice system is rotten.
That bothers me too. Not just because it totally misses the point (shooting unarmed white people is wrong too), but because by all signs it’s untrue. They never treated Kinsey like an innocent hostage. Instead of rushing to his aid after shooting him, they put him in cuffs.
Did they even cuff the autistic guy? What changed post-shooting that enabled them to move in and suddenly control the scene, in a way that had supposedly been impossible beforehand? Why the lying and delayed disciplinary response, if this a case of nothing to see here, folks?
Difference, defiance. I could see the confusion there.
Hey, autistic lives matter!
The latest: A North Miami, Florida, police officer who shot an unarmed black mental health therapist was identified Friday as a SWAT team member, and a police commander accused of fabricating information about the shooting was suspended.
It’s also a lie. We can clearly hear Kinsey yelling that he is a counselor, that the other guy is his patient, that the guy has a toy truck in his hands… if we can hear that clearly on a cel phone video taken from further away than the police were, the police could hear it clearly too.
Damn near the entire police statement appears to be lies, actually.
Yeah, I know that the first thing I do when I shoot the wrong person is to arrest him and provide no medical attention and ignore the guy I thought had a weapon.
That’s what we do: leave the dangerous guy unrestrained and secure the bystander. Keeps the innocent ones safe and out of the way, right?
Which is the worst part. Do the police in this situation really think the public are just going to mindlessly believe every criminal lie they spout, no matter what the evidence says? The arrogance of their statement makes me think that yes they do. Which implies it is a pattern.
So the cop who ‘accidentally’ shot the therapist is a SWAT team member. Aren’t those guys supposed to have more training than average cops?
I will offer props to North Miami Mayor Smith Josephs and city councilmen Philippe Bien-Aime and Scott Galvin for their statements concerning the matter. All three have gone beyond the usual tepid language used and issued quite forceful condemnations, especially of the attempt to cover this up.
If any of the three of them ever chance upon the Dope: good job, folks!
I just saw this post and although I echoed you on the first paragraph, your second paragraph makes an excellent point that I failed to consider at all.
Sadly, despite it not being proper procedure, it does happen. Remember in 2014 when LA cops shot up a truck with over 100 rounds because they thought that Chris Dorner was in it, despite never having seen the inside of the cab? 8 cops just opened fire on the truck only to find it was just a woman and her mother doing their newspaper delivery route. AFAIK, those cops are all still working as cops today; none lost their jobs over the incident.
It’s the first rule for non-cops, no question. For cops, the first rule is, “quickly shoot the black guy and then stand around while he bleeds to death.”
There were two separate incidents, 25 minutes apart.
I’m bothered by the idea that the North Miami police responded to reports of a man threatening suicide by sending the SWAT team. How about sending an officer trained in talking down such people?
And there’s an article in The New York Times today about a Manhattan dermatologist who was arrested at her office a couple of years ago for illegal possession of prescription drugs. The article describes the arresting officers as a “SWAT team in military garb”. Again, was it really necessary to send the SWAT team to a medical office to arrest someone with no record of violence?