WTF! The Cops Shoot Another Black Person While He’s Lying Next To An Autistic Person
Note: This story appeared on my blog on July 22, 2016.
Two days ago in Miami, a police officer shot an unarmed black man who was lying on the ground with his hands up. The man, Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist at a care facility, was simply trying to retrieve an autistic resident who had wandered away. The police claim that Kinsey was shot accidentally, that they were aiming at the other man on the scene, an autistic man who was holding a toy truck.
That begs the question: why the actual fuck were the police willing to shoot at someone with an intellectual disability?
As disturbing as that is, it is not at all unusual. According to the ACLU, hundreds of mentally ill and intellectually disabled people are injured and killed by police each year. A few examples:
In 2011, in Maine, mentally ill people were shot and killed by police in five separate incidents.
In September, 2012, Houston police shot a wheelchair bound double amputee with a history of mental health problems. The victim had threatened to stab police with his pen.
In 2015, Dallas Police shot and killed a man with a history of mental health problems after he brandished a screwdriver. In January, New York City police shot an emotionally disturbed man who was wielding a knife near a housing projects. In May, the NYPD shot and injured another emotionally disturbed person who charged them with a dagger.
The sad fact of the matter is that police officers are not adequately trained to respond to mentally ill or intellectually disabled people. And given the general stigma against mentally disabled people, most police officers aren’t comfortable interacting with them anyway. These negative biases most definitely come into play during police stand-offs.
In the case of the Miami shooting, this discomfort around mentally challenged people went hand in hand with implicit racial bias against blacks. The sad fact of the matter is that police officers often interpret any behavior by black men, no matter how neutral, to be threatening. A black man and an autistic man on the same scene was an unjustifiable shooting waiting to happen.
Fortunately, for Kinsey, his gunshot wound is not life-threatening and the autistic man was uninjured. However, unless the Miami police learn to handle situations like this without drawing their weapons, it is only a matter of time before this happens again. And the next time, someone will die.
