“All he has is a toy truck in his hand,” Charles Kinsey, the man lying on his back, yells at two police officers standing behind telephone poles just a few dozen feet away on Northeast 14th Avenue. “That’s all it is. There is no need for guns.” Police said they only learned later that Kinsey worked at a care facility and that the man sitting near him was autistic. After the recording stopped, one of the officers fired three shots, hitting Kinsey at least once in one leg.
“When it hit me, I’m like, I still got my hands in the air,” Kinsey, an African American, said in an interview from his hospital bed with WSVN TV.
Police have not said why the officer fired, although a police union representative said Thursday that the officer, who has not been identified and who has been placed on administrative leave, was aiming for the man with autism, apparently thinking he was armed, and was trying to protect Kinsey. In moments recorded during the encounter Monday, Kinsey can be heard trying to calm the man with autism sitting next to him. That man, who also was not identified, had apparently wandered away from a group home where Kinsey said he works as a behavioral therapist.
The recording, along with a second video, taken after the gunshots and showing Kinsey and the man with autism being handcuffed, was the latest in the seemingly unending stream of violent encounters between police and black men captured on camera and propelled into national headlines.
It arrives as the country is still on edge over issues of race and law enforcement. Recordings of fatal police encounters and their aftermaths in Louisiana and Minnesota this month helped revive protests over how law enforcement officer use deadly force, while the deadly shootings of police officers in Dallas, Texas and in Baton Rogue, Louisiana in have spurred further fears among officers over the threats they face on the job.
The videos of Monday’s incident in North Miami spread wildly online Wednesday night and Thursday, and state officials said they had launched an investigation. But key questions remain unanswered, including whether the officer who fired had actually been aiming at the man with autism still sitting up in the street.
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Nathaniel Pickett II was walking back to his $18-a-night room at the El Rancho, a seen-better-days bungalow motel along historic Route 66 in Barstow, Calif. It was shortly after 9 p.m. on Nov. 19, 2015, and Nate, as his family called him, often took evening walks. As the 29-year-old former engineering student crossed the street, he caught the eye of Kyle Woods, a San Bernardino sheriff's deputy. Woods made a U-turn into the motel parking lot, jumped out of his cruiser and approached Pickett, police records show.
He demanded Pickett's name and birthdate. Pickett complied. In fact, he did everything Woods asked of him, including taking his hands out of his pockets. When Woods asked him if he lived at the motel and where he was from, Pickett said he didn't know. When Pickett asked if he had done something wrong, the deputy said he just wanted to talk to him.
"What's the problem?" Pickett asked Woods nine times as the deputy peppered him with questions about whether he had ever been arrested (yes), if he had lived in Barstow all of his life and where he was going.
"There is no problem," Woods responded.
Pickett asked if he could go to his room where he had lived since moving to Barstow seven weeks earlier. Woods would later admit under oath that he knew he had no probable cause to arrest him and that Pickett had the right to walk away. But when he tried, Woods grabbed him and told him to "stop resisting." Woods threatened to use a Taser on him. Pickett put his arms up and was running toward his room — Room 45 — when he tripped and fell in the breezeway. As he scooted backward from Woods, the deputy caught him. The two scuffled while a male citizen volunteer on patrol with Woods watched from a few feet away. Woods punched Pickett 15 to 20 times before pulling out his service weapon and threatening to shoot him. He fired, hitting Pickett twice in the chest — once with the barrel of the gun pressed against the man's chest.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/25/956177021/fatal-police-shootings-of-unarmed-black-people-reveal-troubling-patterns
The lack of probable cause immediately ended the legality of the officer’s actions, which means that a person cannot resist an arrest that is not an arrest. A person has the right of protection against illegal search and seizure. The Supreme Court has defined a law enforcement officer stopping a person as detention, because the person is detained from freedom of movement. Detention is often the first act in investigation, and it must be done lawfully. Detention is also a type of seizure, because the person has been seized by government control. Detention, in its legal definition, does not even require handcuffing, being placed in the back of a patrol car, being taken to a police station, being placed in a cell, etc. While all of those are examples of detention, the mere act of stopping a person to ask a few questions is a form of simple detention. All detention must be reasonable. If further information or evidence results from the investigation that comes from simple detention, and probable cause for arrest is established, instead of merely being detained, the person is then placed under formal arrest.
Had a civilian stopped Pickett in the same way that the officer did and carried out those exact same actions, I believe that charges of unlawful detention, assault and battery, aggravated assault, unlawful discharge of a firearm, 2nd degree murder, violation of civil rights, etc. could apply and could be proven at a trial.
As for the person on this website who challenged me to produce even one case of Black men being shot by police when they were not resisting arrest, I am patiently awaiting rebuttal. I appreciate the link you’ve provided, as it outlines more and more such incidents.
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The apologist will probably come up with some loophole.
Thank you. That incident was a whole multitude of people in general, both government and everyday citizens, who attacked and murdered countless innocent Black people, to include young children. So deep was the atmosphere of racism and discrimination and fear and intimidation and the ominous threat of retaliation and further killings in its aftermath, decades of people grew up right in the very location where it took place without ever even hearing any official acknowledgment that it even happened, and not one person out of the hundreds of perpetrators was ever even brought to justice. The coverup was also nationwide and worldwide. No history books included it for almost an entire century (the entities in power decide what history is or is not taught). While I am not at all discounting the importance of it, I do want to make the distinction that it was not a police-only action. Thank you for submitting it.
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Gee, I’m not only deeply confused, I’m also left exasperated by your “reply”.
My confusion comes from the fact that even though YOU YOURSELF asked ME to show you even one incident of police shooting a Black man who wasn’t resisting arrest, which I have done, why in the heck are YOU now asking ME what I think should be done about people who do resist? YOU are the one on that side of the discussion, so how do YOU expect ME to supply YOUR position? Remember, this was triggered by your lie that in each and every case, people were shot because of failing to obey or actively resisting, which is why you challenged me in the first place to present cases in which they were not!
I am exasperated because it appeared you were under the impression that people somehow provoke police officers into using force because they disobey officers’ orders or they resist arrest. Intentional blindness is the only thing that keeps a person from seeing that ethnicity is one of the first determining factors in how many police officers decide to interact with people, and the default is “dark skin — go in hard and tough”. It’s ok if you don’t understand that from your own perspective, you’re not on the receiving end of it. But when person after person, some of them your own ethnicity, repeatedly gives you information that shows it happens differently for minorities, you just did in your heels and claim that 99 % of the cases are the fault of the citizens who do something wrong during an encounter.
So now when your entire “they resisted” house of cards is flagrantly dismantled right before your eyes, you don’t have one word to say about how you must have been wrong, did not realize that such cases existed, acknowledged that Black people are treated differently even when obeying or when not resisting, nothing from you at all that addresses your “they should just obey, they shouldn’t resist” platform. People are being subjected to brutality and death even when they do everything right. Once a person has been murdered (not killed, it’s a legally distinction) by police, going in after the fact with consequences against officers doesn’t bring them back to life, and the frustration is that it keeps happening over and over and over again!
(Case in point, it just happened again on March 29, 2021 in Chicago, when teen Adam Toledo followed the officer’s orders to stop running and put up his hands. His reward for following orders was a bullet to the chest AS HE RAISED BOTH OF HIS EMPTY HANDS ON THE AIR, as shown on the officer’s body cam video.)
Where did I mention Chauvin (the correct spelling) and Potter?
You still can’t grasp the focus of this thread that YOU requested. You can come up with all of your “sometimes” soap-boxing somewhere else. YOU claimed the high percentage of police shootings of Black people were due to people’s disobedience of police orders and/or people fighting with police officers and/or people resisting arrest. You have gone on and on and on in one post after another on numerous questions here with your stance about how victims were at fault for getting themselves killed because they didn’t and don’t conduct themselves properly during police encounters. You have fought back against people who try to reason with you. You have presented loopholes through which officers could or should or might be exonerated. So where are your long diatribes in discussing what you asked for from me? When I was one of the people who tried to present differing angles from which the issue can be seen, you replied by asking me to give evidence of officers shooting people absent of your big three go-to victim-blaming foundations. YOU have now been given exactly what YOU challenged me to come up with, yet YOU keep going on and on on with this same pablum of yours:
“Sometimes it is the suspects alone. And sometimes it is BOTH the police and the suspects fault. And sometimes with the existing laws. And sometimes it is a combination of the three.”
Try to stay focused on what you pretended to want to discuss: incidents where Black people were injured or killed by police officers even though they were NOT DISOBEYING POLICE ORDERS, WERE NOT FIGHTING WITH POLICE OFFICERS, AND/OR WERE NOT RESISTING ARREST.
As long as YOU continue to a) ignore the precise and specific subject matter that you thought didn’t exist (remember, YOU wrote that 99% figure about the shootings being the victims’ faults), and b) continue to spew the same blame-game, then I will also continue to a) ignore your off-topic rankings, and b) continue to re-address the factual nature of the opposing side.
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Another dodge from you? Gee, what a surprise! So 2017 is too ancient for you, is it? Fine, here’s one you must have ignored intentionally:
March 29, 2021 in Chicago, when teen Adam Toledo followed the officer’s orders to stop running and put up his hands. His reward for following orders was a bullet to the chest AS HE RAISED BOTH OF HIS EMPTY HANDS ON THE AIR, as shown on the officer’s body cam video.
As for your claim that you need more recent examples than 2017, it keeps happening over and over again, so here’s what I’ll do: every time there’s yet another murder, I’ll try and post the information here right away so that it’s fresh and you can begin your apologist campaign immediately.
Jane S 
