Lorini wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2020 10:27 am
Doesn't matter. Disabled people matter, mentally ill people matter, and when you're trying to get help in a critical situation you need help. And if the police can't help, they should not show up.
I think the problem here is that they sent a hammer because someone though there might be a nail, but wasn't sure. Then the hammer hit the window to try and clean it. It's more of the same with either 911 not sending the right tools for the job or simply being given only hammers for every job. It's a textbook case for defund/reform.
I don't think this is the second, or third, or fourth time we've heard a similar story where police are called specifically to help someone in a mental crisis and they respond with bullets.
The most insane one I think I had read about was where there was a s
ocial worker right there, trying to calm things down and the police simply decided that wasn't good enough and ended up shooting the social worker in the leg.
2016 News Article wrote:When a 23-year-old autistic man carrying a toy truck wandered from a mental health center out into the street Monday, a worker there named Charles Kinsey went to retrieve him.
A few minutes later the autistic man was still sitting cross-legged blocking the roadway while playing with the small, rectangular white toy. And Kinsey was prone on the ground next to him — a bullet from an assault rifle fired by a police officer having struck his leg.
“He throws his hands up in the air and says, ‘Don’t shoot me.’ They say lie on the ground, so he does,” Kinsey’s attorney Hilton Napoleon said Wednesday. “He’s on his back with his hands in the air trying to convince the other guy to lie down. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The video, taken before the officer fired his weapon, shows Kinsey on his back with his hands in the air telling police he didn’t have a weapon and asking them not to fire. At one point the autistic man appears to yell at Kinsey to shut up. A second brief video shows officers who are carrying rifles physically patting down Kinsey and the autistic man while they are lying on the ground.
Kinsey said when he asked the officer why he fired his weapon, the cop responded, “I don’t know.”
By Wednesday, North Miami police hadn’t offered much of an explanation. Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas said the investigation has been turned over to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.