North Miami Officer On Paid Leave After Shooting Unarmed Black Man

Charles Kinsey, 47, said he was trying to coax his 23-year-old patient with autism in Florida.

The chief said officers responded following reports of a man with a gun threatening to kill himself, and the officers arrived “with that threat in mind” – but no gun was recovered from the scene. “I assure you, we’ll get all the answers”, the police chief told reporters Thursday.

The officer involved in the shooting, according to the fact sheet, is a 30-year-old Hispanic male, employed by the North Miami Police Department for four years.

“Shut up!” responds the patient, who is sitting cross-legged in the road.

“Rinaldo, please be still, Rinaldo”, he is heard saying on the video to the autistic man. “Sit down, Rinaldo, Lay on your stomach”.

“I was really more anxious about him than myself”, Kinsey told the local affiliate.

“They flipped me over, and I’m faced down in the ground, with cuffs on, waiting on the rescue squad to come”. I’m unarmed, he’s an autistic guy. “A toy truck. I am a behavior therapist at a group home”. They said that Charles Kinsey, “later identified as an employee a group home, was shot by one of our Officers”. Video footage captures the moments before the shooting, and its aftermath, but not the shooting itself. “It was like a mosquito bite, and when it hit me, I’m like, I still got my hands in the air, and I said, ‘No, I just got shot, ‘” Kinsey said.

Kinsey’s attorney Hilton Napoleon told the Miami Herald that the shooting “didn’t make any sense”, and that Kinsey was already negotiating a possible settlement with the city.

In a segment of the encounter with police that apparently wasn’t captured on video, Kinsey was shot in the leg. “This is what I’m thinking”, Kinsey told WSVN from his hospital bed.

“From what I saw, he was lying on the ground with his hands up”.

But the North Miami police officer who shot Kinsey was actually trying to protect him, and meant to shoot the autistic man next to him, but missed, the head of the police union said Thursday.

“There are many questions about what happened on Monday night“.

“As long as I’ve got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me”, he said.

“Why did you shoot me?”

North Miami has a population of about 62,000 people, almost 60 percent African-American.

Two can be seen in the video, peering from behind utility poles about 22 metres away. The shooting, which Kinsey survived, is under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the state’s attorney’s office. The officer wanted to hit the autistic man, who was being helped by Kinsey. The incident illustrates the edgy mood of USA police and the nation in general after the police ambush in Dallas that left five officers dead and another similar incident Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that killed three.

“At that time, we will conduct our own investigation and review all of the evidence to determine whether the actions of the shooting officer constitute a criminal act that can be proven beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt”, the statement reads.

It was soon followed by the death of Philando Castile, who was legally registered to carry a gun and told an officer that he had a weapon during a July 6 traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb.

The shooting, while not fatal, is being scrutinized as another example of excessive use of force by police against unarmed black men.