Charles Kinsey held his hands in the air and shouted to police that the autistic man sitting on the street next to him wasn’t dangerous. A few seconds later, he felt bullets rip into his leg.
The therapist, who is black and works with people with disabilities, was rounding up a patient who had wandered away from a facility when he was ordered by police officers to lie on the ground. Kinsey imagined that “as long as I’ve got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking.” ”Wow, was I wrong,” he told a television station.
The shooting in Florida earlier this week illustrates the longstanding fear among black men that almost any encounter with police can go awry with potentially deadly results, even when a person follows every law enforcement command.
Police are known to pull their triggers “no matter how you follow their directions,” emphasized Isaial Murray, a black 28-year-old construction worker in Detroit.
Some black men question why police seem to avoid using deadly force on dangerous white suspects, like Dylan Roof, who is charged with killing nine African-Americans last year in a church in South Carolina, but are quick to point a gun at blacks.