Whether the rest of America wants to admit it or not, black people have to fear for their lives every day living in this country. They’ve been trying to tell us this for years now. I do hope we start listening soon. Please watch this 4-minute video of Charles Kinsey, a black therapist helping a patient in North Miami, trying to tell a police officer not to shoot him only to be shot by the officer and handcuffed. The video is not graphic and the man lives; most of the video is the man talking about the baffling experience:
This is not an isolated incident. If you think it is, you are not listening to the fear black people have of living in this country.
It’s unlikely that something like this would have happened to a white person.
Now moving forward, this is what we need to pay attention to:
- Will this police officer be fired?
- Will this police officer go to court?
- Will this police officer have to serve jail time for this?
- While what you see in the video is bad, it’s not the core reason for Black Lives Matter and other related protests. The core reason is that these things happen over and over again without the officer being held accountable whatsoever.
If you can watch this video and think that the officer shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions, you really need to check yourself.
And if this officer gets to do this and then walk free with no repercussions, we all should be in an uproar, as well as scared for our lives that this is the justice system we live in…or at least scared for the lives of our black brothers and sisters.
It is good and right (and biblical) to protest unjust justice systems.
None of this villianizes police officers. One officer committed a very awful crime. This officer needs to face the penalty of our legal system for this. If they do, it will create a safer world for all police officers and will allow us the peace of mind to separate the good officers out from the bad, thanking the good ones profusely for their work. If they don’t, it’s only going to make a lot of people very angry and some lunatic is going to start shooting police again. The verdict lies in the hands of our legal system. Have they learned yet or will they continue to let unjust acts go unpunished?
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Hey Noah,
I haven’t read anything about this incident and I’m not trying to comment on it or any other incident. I’m just curious of your take on something. A couple of weeks ago here in Michigan, a prisoner who was in handcuffs managed to steal a baliff’s gun and kill two people and injure a third person. The thing people are always saying in reference to Garner, Brown, Sterling, etc. is that either they were unarmed or they had been neutralized. This is an example where someone was both unarmed and seemingly neutralized and he managed to kill two people. Does this incident change your opinion at all on the issue of police shootings? If yes, how so? If not, why?
Good question Lee. No, it doesn’t change my opinion. There is real risk in many of these situations of the unarmed, neutralized person suddenly snapping and going off. But that doesn’t mean they should be shot out of anticipation of that. That sort of reminds me of Minority Report, I know that’s an old movie, but that was the premise. There was a way to stop a crime before it started and of course that backfired. Feels way too much like a “shoot first and ask questions later” mindset. That mindset is what causes things like this Charles Kinsey incident and it’s what makes black people fear for their lives. Just being around a black person raises the blood pressure of the police officer and makes them trigger happy. Sadly, things like what happened in the St. Joe’s courthouse are unpreventable to a point. Would it have been right for an officer to shoot that man because he was looking around the room shiftily? No. Now if an officer could have shot him while he was reaching for the gun, then that would have been fine. That is why these cases need to go to court, but seldom do. But what happened in the St. Joe’s courthouse should not make Charles Kinsey, or one of my many black friends, get shot.
I thought of one more thing Lee. Why aren’t officers handcuffing people (with hands behind back) they feel are dangerous, rather than shooting them? I know that can’t always happen, like in a traffic stop, but I’m thinking of the Alton Sterling video; there were 3 officers on his back, then one of the officers starts firing. Couldn’t three officers force handcuffs on this man’s wrist? Or same with the St. Joe shooting, why isn’t the man being escorted with his hands cuffed behind his back?
Another thought with the St. Joe shooting, I read about what crime that guy was on trial for: he had a teenage girl locked in a shed and he would force her to have sex with her, giving her meth. That’s another reason to have his hands cuffed behind his back, that is a pretty crazy crime, a man like that shouldn’t have the opportunity to reach for an officer’s gun, knowing what he’s capable of / prone to.
In regards to the how the St. Joe criminal, I would totally agree about having has hands behind his back. I’m sure there is a procedure that requires them to do it in front. I’m not sure why but I doubt they just do that arbitrarily. Maybe this situation will cause them to change.
In regards to Alton Sterling, I don’t have any solid answers on the whole thing. I will just say this. One time in college some friends were trying to pull a prank on me that required them to pin me down. Four guys came after me while I was laying on my back on a couch and they still never got me pinned down. So it was four to one and I started out on my back and they still couldn’t do it. Unless you’re way stronger than someone it is very difficult to completely neutralize their arms, especially if they are having a rush of adrenaline. I guarantee if you, me and another adult male were trying to cuff Alton Sterling, it would take a while and it wouldn’t look pretty. I’m not saying they should have shot him, I’m just saying I think it’s harder than we realize.
That’s a good point about the handcuffs while someone is on the ground with Alton Sterling. I read they tasered him several times as well. Once they realized he had on a gun on him and he was still resisting them, they shot him. Though he wasn’t reaching for his gun and it is legal to have a gun. Definitely a hard situation.
So you mentioned that it would be more justified if the perp had been shot while reaching for the officers gun. Don’t we have things similar to that happening in some of these cases?
Also, I don’t bring this case up to say that cops should just shoot people out of anticipation that someone might hurt them. My point is that perhaps this incident in St. Joe shows us that the cops are in more danger in some of these confrontations than we realize. Take Michael Brown for example. I know that he died, I don’t know what would have happened had Darren Wilson not pulled the trigger. It’s easy to think “It’s a shame that Michael Brown is dead, I’m sure that situation could have been resolved without a fatality, after all Michael Brown was unarmed”. That’s an easy thing to think staring at a computer screen but this situation in St Joe. makes me re-consider how easy it is for cops to resolve situations without hurting someone and how likely they are to get hurt if they don’t use force to protect themselves.
This is also why I think compliance is so important. When I am standing still, showing my hands, following instructions and keeping my cool the officer knows he is safe. When I don’t do those things, that’s when the officer questions his safety and thinks that he has to make a choice between his safety or mine. I know there are times when people get shot when they are compliant, cops get none of my sympathy in those cases. But in cases where people don’t comply, I’m inclined to remember this story in St. Joe and give the cops a fair amount of latitude.
Those are good points. The Michael Brown case is confusing because initial witness testimony says he had his hands up saying “Don’t Shoot” –which gives the exact picture of this Charles Kinsey incident. But then Wilson’s testimony and other conflicting witnesses say Brown attacked Wilson and reached for his gun. None of us know because we weren’t there. This is why the body cameras and dash cams are sooo important. I think of the guy who got shot by the cop, Ray Tensing, in Cincinnati that was all caught on his dash cam or body cam (I don’t remember which) — http://www.atacrossroads.net/body-cameras-protect-good-cops-bring-justice-to-bad/ — man that cop was about as bad as they get, but no one would have ever known if not for the camera footage. And there’s a lot of cops like Tensing out there, naturally, like any occupational field is going to have bad apples. So get cameras out there to prevent that from becoming the culture, which is what it’s been in our country for centuries. But the pressure and awareness of the need for cameras would never have been there without Black Lives Matter and other protests and pressure. This will only help the many good cops and will increase police / community relations. It’s almost like steroid-testing in baseball, all the clean players are all about the need for testing. But in conclusion, I definitely admit not all of these cases are the same. Michael Brown is very different from Charles Kinsey.
One of the worst things about Brown’s case is they left him dead in the sun for 4 hours.
The thing I keep coming back to (and the shooting in St. Joe was a big part of it) is that these for the most part are messy. There are some that are pretty straight forward like Walter Scott but most of the ones that I see are complicated.
I think these happen mostly because when cops deal with suspects their heart rate goes up just a little bit more if the suspect is black and that little difference is the tipping point in a few of these situations. Obviously this is still bad but it’s a far cry from the narrative of a massive cop conspiracy mowing down innocent blacks. Obviously a lot needs to change from a police perspective (I’ll get to that) but keeping the police shooting situation in perspective and fairly evaluating each situation without prejudice is important too. There are some in the BLM camp that stir up fear by exaggerating and spreading false narratives. This just causes people to be more antagonistic and less compliant with police which only increases the likelihood of fatal confrontations.
I’m with you on body cams. They keep cops in check, they get information out there and they help to protect good cops. Body cams aren’t perfect. Video doesn’t always tell the whole story, things happen off screen and video can be edited by the media. But of course they are still important. I can’t believe there are people that don’t have it. We’ve had it in GR for years.
I think the biggest change necessary is the mentality of separation that the police often have. Many people think that to have authority you have to build a wall between yourself and the people that have authority over. Too often cops have that mentality. They’re distant and standoffish and they consider the people they police beneath them. This mentality necessarily breeds an attitude of contempt directed toward them from the community. If police went out and engaged with the community, listened, joked and just generally showed good faith, people wouldn’t be angry and afraid whenever they saw a cop. If people viewed their local cops as friends who are there to protect and serve then cops would get way more compliance when they have an interaction and if a confrontation went bad they would actually get support. Things would have unfolded very differently in Ferguson if Darren Wilson had been the friendly neighborhood cop.
This is well said Anonymous, thank you. I agree with,
and I’m someone who has a Black Lives Matter yard sign in my yard! Relating to your last paragraph…I’ve had a number of interaction with police while doing urban ministry in Lansing, where we call the police to come help with a situation. Sometimes the officers are super cool, super nice and super fair, then other times you get the guy (usually it’s a guy who’s like this!) who feels they have to prove to the world that they are in charge and in authority and they treat everyone, including me, like we are inferior. Basically a big power trip. I imagine it’s a lot of these “types” who are doing these shootings, and the rest of the officers are left being clumped together. In a secular institution like the Police Department, it’s hard to see this type of thing ever being able to be really weeded out.
What many don’t see is that the bad relationship between police and black neighborhoods began a long time ago and never got addressed proactively, so all that residual tension and mistrust is still there on both sides.
This incident really troubles me. As near as I can tell, the person with the most fear was the guy with the lethal weapon. Kinsey seems to be doing all he can to comply and still he got shot.
It does bother me that the most important moment isn’t on video, and it reminds me that we only get one (often incomplete) perspective from these incidents.
Anyway I wanted to say +1 and yes we need to see what happens here. It seems no one will be held responsible for the death of Freddie Gray. I am glad Kinsey will recover, and meanwhile we can only pray for more love and justice.
Rob, do you know if there’s anywhere online that tracks these cases that shows 1. which police officers went to trial, 2. which ones were given criminal punishment? I’d be curious to know this. I sometimes hear about police going to trial for these and other times hear the case gets thrown out before going to trial. As this is one of the largest things being protested in the Black Lives Matter movement, I wonder if anyone is tracking this?
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