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Police, yet again, refuse first aid for man they shot for no reason

Police, yet again, refuse first aid for man they shot for no reason

Last updated on: July 21, 2016 at 6:02 pm by Fred Clark

Police, yet again, refuse first aid for man they shot for no reason 2016-07-21T18:02:32-04:00 Fred Clark

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A police officer in North Miami, Florida, shot a man Wednesday for no apparent reason. (That local news story is well done, but their website is a malicious, browser-locking monstrosity. Here’s CNN’s report on the story. Quotes below are from the local story on the reader-punishing site.)

A therapist who works with people with disabilities is telling his story after he said North Miami police shot him while he was trying to help his patient with autism.

Cellphone video was released Wednesday afternoon showing Charles Kinsey lying on the ground with his hands in the air, telling officers that weapons are not necessary. …

In his hospital bed Wednesday and speaking to 7News exclusively, Kinsey said, “When I went to the ground, I’m going to the ground just like this here with my hands up,” Kinsey said, “and I am laying down here just like this, and I’m telling them again, ‘Sir, there is no need for firearms. I’m unarmed, he’s an autistic guy. He got a toy truck in his hand.”

Kinsey said he was attempting to calm an autistic patient who ran away from a group home. Kinsey could be heard in the video saying, “All he has is a toy truck. A toy truck. I am a behavior therapist at a group home.”

In the video, Kinsey is heard asking his patient to calm down. “Rinaldo, please be still, Rinaldo. Sit down, Rinaldo. Lay on your stomach.”

The ordeal went on for a few minutes before Kinsey said one of the officers shot him. “I’m like this right here, and when he shot me, it was so surprising,” Kinsey said. “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! And I’m saying, ‘Sir, why did you shoot me?’ and his words to me, he said, ‘I don’t know.’”

North Miami Police said the incident began, Monday, when someone called 911 and said there was a man walking around with a gun threatening suicide. Kinsey said the man was his patient and the alleged gun was a toy truck, which he said was clearly visible to police. “I was really more worried about him than myself. I was thinking as long as I have my hands up … they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking, they’re not going to shoot me. Wow, was I wrong.”

Kinsey was then shot in the leg. The shooting was not captured on camera, but Kinsey said he had his hands up the entire time.

The therapist said police then rushed him, patted him down and put him in handcuffs. Kinsey said what police did after the shooting is what upsets him the most. “They flipped me over, and I’m faced down in the ground, with cuffs on, waiting on the rescue squad to come. I’d say about 20, about 20 minutes it took the rescue squad to get there. And I was like, bleeding — I mean bleeding, and I was like, ‘Wow.’”

We could play the perverse game of pointing out that Charles Kinsey appears, yet again, to be the “perfect victim,” and thus that his shooting ought to, at long last, prevent those clinging to a victim-blaming just-world fallacy from arguing that police shot him because he did something “wrong,” or because he was insufficiently respectful and deferential, or because of some past misdeed of his, or because of how he was dressed.

But that’s a mug’s game. No matter how respectful and respectable the citizen-victim, no matter how scrupulously they adhere to the purported script for how one is “supposed to” behave when being protected and served by twitchy, gun-toting cops, it will never be sufficient to persuade those who seek to exonerate violent authority. No good-faith response will ever satisfy their bad-faith objections.

Charles Kinsey was a good man who followed the script of obsequious, submissive deference, and he still got shot. Philando Castile was a good man who followed that script and he’s dead.

Oh, and also, that script is, itself, incompatible with the idea that we are free citizens in a free country. Being forced and expected to grovel at the whim of armed government agents means we are not being treated as citizens and that we cannot think of ourselves as free. (All you right-wing Christians rushing to cite Romans 13 need to go re-read every time St. Paul invoked his status as a Roman citizen as a shield against the very kind of groveling flattery you insist that black Americans display lest they be to blame for their own fatal shooting. Paul assumed that decadent, pagan Roman emperors had a higher regard for the rule of law than you think police officers with badges should ever be required to have.)

Nor is “better training” an adequate response to incidents like the one above. Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson was asked about that yesterday:

Wilson was asked whether better training in mental health issues would have made a difference, she said we can only pray. “That’s the only solution I have,” said Wilson. “As I stand here, when you shoot a man lying on the ground with his hands up explaining to you the situation — and you shoot him anyway — something is not right with that picture, so we, as a district, are in shock.”

Prayer is not a plan. Nor is hypothetically “better” training. Police have no incentive to heed such training, no incentive to learn to evaluate or de-escalate, when they carry on their hip a last resort that can be routinely deployed as a first result without any repercussions.

In short, police officers should not carry guns.

Police departments should be equipped with guns, and with a minority of specially trained officers who are permitted to use them when necessary — literally permit-ted, as in carrying actual, difficult-to-earn-and-maintain permits.

Most of the time, most police officers should be doing their job without carrying guns.

But I want to highlight another aspect of the story reported and documented above: After the unarmed and extravagantly compliant Charles Kinsey was shot, he was handcuffed and left lying in the streets for 20 minutes until paramedics arrived to provide medical care.

The police who shot him did not provide even rudimentary first aid as Charles Kinsey lay there, bleeding. This is monstrously irresponsible. It is, frankly, evil.

And it is par for the course for trigger-happy American police. The same callous, ignorant, irresponsible lack of any attempt at first aid was seen previously when police shot Philando Castile, and when police shot Alton Sterling, and when police shot Walter Scott, and when police shot Michael Brown — and when police shot dozens of other American citizens we could name and hundreds more whose names we have forgotten in the unending flood of such names.

Police officers should not be carrying guns. But if they must carry guns, and therefore wind up using them, then they absolutely must be required to provide immediate first aid to any person they have shot, disarmed and handcuffed. This must be part of their oath of duty. Failure to provide such first aid to a handcuffed, no-longer-plausibly-a-threat shooting victim should mean that these first non-responders are never, ever again permitted to touch a badge or a gun or a uniform.

It seems strange that such an infinitesimal aspect of basic human decency and such a minimal compliance with a fundamental moral obligation should need to be stated, let alone written down as part of officers’ code of conduct. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with any human being who doesn’t automatically, instinctively attempt such immediate care without prompting. It suggests they are the product of massive, cascading failures of education, religion, parenting, cognitive development and every level of moral formation.

But, apparently, that’s who we’ve got patrolling our streets. Weirdly, tragically, incomprehensibly, this is something these people need to be told, in writing. So let’s make sure they are told, in writing.

Let’s incorporate this into whatever training our police officers receive in first aid. “And then you apply pressure to stop the bleeding, OK? Because, again, you don’t want to be the kind of morally stunted sicko $#%@-bag who just stands around doing nothing while someone is bleeding, right? Because that would be a dereliction of duty, a firing offense, and an abiding source of shame for your entire extended family and all the rest of us who wear this uniform, right? OK, then, as you apply pressure …”

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