When you really think about it, this is insane. I've read all the discussion and everyone seems to agree that there is no justification possible. There's not even room for confusion or panic or any irrational emotion here.

In my opinion, anyone deciding to shoot on the basis of the conversation that took place was doing so deliberately, knowing that it was not legal or appropriate.

So did he do this in retaliation to the attack on police, or would he have done this anyway?

And was the man left bleeding on the ground for fifteen minutes in the hope that he would die? And therefore leave no mentally sound witnesses available for the hearing - they did not know of the recording at the time?

Once a person is in your custody, their life is in your care. You have a duty to protect them and provide them with appropriate assistance. It should be the number one priority of any person present, once the subject(s) have been controlled, to offer immediate medical assistance regardless of their prior behaviour.

Could you imagine being the person with blood pouring from your leg, not allowed to stand up, stood over by three people walking around and radioing around ignoring your cries of pain and/or cries for help? You have no idea if you're going to bleed out, you only know that these people are refusing to help as you lie there possibly dying.

Think of that for a minute. They didn't know the extent of the damage..... they stood impassive as a man potentially died in front of them.

Even scarier? How many times has this happened in the past?

Unless clear action is taken by authorities or government, this is a time bomb waiting to go off. You can't have state sponsored ethnic cleansing without expecting a backlash - you can't expect a people to allow themselves to be killed.

What I think newtboy is saying is that, at some point, this turns into a justified resistance to an oppressive and violent regime... and describing them as thugs or anarchists becomes state propaganda. And who is anyone to decide when that time has come but those who have most to fear? Let's hope there is still time to fix this problem without further violence.

I always have a tendency to think "let's not be hasty" when considering stuff like this. There's always (at least) two sides to every story.

For example, with Philando Castile (man shot in the car):
He *did* have a gun in the car.
His girlfriend said that he told the officer about it and did not do anything threatening at all, but there is/was at least *some* potential that the cops would tell a different story.
The video of the event didn't show how things escalated, so we have to figure it out based on the reports of two potentially biased reports -- the girlfriend/family and the police.

Honestly, that was enough to look quite bad for the police, BUT my "don't be hasty" tendencies were still in play.


And now, we've got this. Like @newtboy has been saying, I just can't fathom the level of incompetence required to make this an "oops" situation. If they were trying to shoot the autistic man and missed and hit Kinsey by mistake ... that's fucked up.

A) If they were trying to "protect" Kinsey, how about listening to him? Did he sound nervous, like he needed protecting? NO. He calmly explained the entire situation, and was obviously NOT afraid of the autistic guy doing him any harm. And this time, they've got a lot of the lead-up on video, so we can actually hear him explain the situation. Any cop (or anyone) with 2 brain cells to rub together would holster their firearm if they listened to his explanation. Maybe they would stay behind cover and let Kinsey either talk the autistic guy into dropping the toy truck in his hand or let him get up and show them clearly that it was not a weapon (since they were responding to a report about someone possibly having a gun), but there's clearly no need to keep the guns aimed on either of them -- and Kinsey told them as much.

B) If they were trying to "protect" him, then why did they cuff him? With 3 sets of cuffs, apparently. After shooting, once they approached and figured out that there was no weapon, any decent human being would jump into action to try to mitigate the fallout of their dumbass mistake. Don't cuff the guy you "accidentally" shot -- call for an ambulance, try to stop the bleeding, etc.


For fucks sake, if that is the story the police are coming up with to explain / defend (hah!) their actions, it is just utterly pathetic. Charge the shooter and the entire police department with something criminal, and throw the law book at every single one of them. My normally strong "let's not be hasty" impulse is looking at this entire mess with a double /facepalm.

Very glad that Mr. Kinsey is expected to fully recover. Maybe the silver lining beyond his survival will be that an event this blatant almost has to force us to acknowledge that there is a serious problem with how our police are operating.

To be clear, the situation appears to be as follows:

The police get a call about a person that may be mental wielding a gun.

Multiple police arrive on scene, where they find a black male and hispanic male.

The hispanic male is clutching something.

The extremely lucid and reasonable sounding black male identifies himself as a caregiver for the hispanic male, clarifies that the hispanic male is autistic, and that the item the hispanic male is carrying is a toy truck.

The black male does all of this, as well as trying to de-escalate the situation, while laying prone on his back with his hands in the air.

The police move in, at some point the black male is shot in the leg.

The police have full control of the situation, both parties are handcuffed.

Medical aid is not provided to the black male for more than 15 minutes. Not even an attempt by an officer to staunch the blood flow.

When the black male asks the officer why he was shot, the officer supposedly responds, "I don't know."

Now, let's examine this closely.

A gunshot wound to the leg could easily have nicked the femoral artery. I doubt the officers were trained to identify this. You can bleed out from seconds to minutes after your femoral artery gets damaged. A reasonable person might take off their shirt and compress the wound or use a belt as a tourniquet.

Before we consider that, really, we should look at one factor. If you choose to be a fireman, a policeman, or be in any other dangerous job, you need to be prepared to face actual danger. Being so scared that you might somehow, maybe, possibly get hurt that you proceed to jumpscare shoot someone who is fucking prone, is not being willing to face danger. It means someone joined the force to be 'better' than the rest of us plebes and not to face an iota of danger.

Also, if it was a white male, laying on his back and doing the same thing, do we expect him to be shot? The likely answer is no. I can't even believe that this was a likely shooting situation. At first, I suspected it might have been one shot that was accidentally discharged. That, while not acceptable, would have been plausible due to nerves. Three shots means three separate trigger pulls, that speaks to intent to shoot.

Luckily this man is going to live. He will likely sue and get a good chunk of money. If he had died, blood would have likely ran in the streets in Florida because one cop got scared that he 'might' be in danger. As far as that cop? He might lose his job briefly. Cop unions will do their best to get him back his job and will likely succeed. Let's be real about the possible ramifications of him going before a grand jury though. Even if he does, he will walk because the prosecutor will throw the case.

Yes, and that's why I display such contempt and distrust of them.

As I understood it, yes, 3 pairs of cuffs, all 3 attached to his wrists, not a chain of 3 pairs to make him comfortable. I mean, why is he cuffed at all? WTF?!? He's not 500lbs, the only time they use more than one pair in a chain is when the perps hands can't fit behind their back, NEVER for comfort....that's simply not what cuffs are about...EVER.

Yes, this level of 'incompetence' (if that's what it was, and I don't concede that) MUST be intentional. It falls so far below the bar we have set as reasonable, or the standards that police MUST meet through testing, that the only way it could actually be his incompetence rather than intentional negligence is if his supervisor intentionally falsified his test results to keep him on the force....so it's either HIS intentional negligence or his supervisors, but either way, it's intentional. No question in my mind that SOMEONE along the chain of responsibility intentionally allowed this behavior...or this level of incompetence that it's clear would lead to this behavior. There was intentional negligence, no way around it.

It actually seems to indicate a lack of a reason for shooting in the first place to me.

I've seen a dozen videos about this. Numerous times they mentioned an over 15 minute wait before he was seen by medics, during which time they had him handcuffed, bleeding in the street, but not charged with any crime or even suspected of one....why the cuffs?

I think that there is a point where negligence is SO intentional, and the results of that negligence SO foreseeable that it's indirect intent. Cops shoot to kill...period. If they shoot inappropriately, like at someone not posing a threat, that's attempted murder IMO. Period. They intend to kill, it's not accidental. Wounding him was accidental and clearly incompetence, which should be another charge IMO, unsafe discharge of a weapon...at least twice for those times he missed completely....and attempted murder 3 times.

(Side note...how in the hell do you miss from that close with a rifle?!? That, as much as anything else, should have people up in arms, that an officer is so non-proficient with his weapon, but still allowed to carry and use it. WTF?!? I want every officer with a firearm to be reasonably proficient with it...really any person with one, but that's another discussion. Police have to train, and prove proficiency with their weapon....how can this possibly happen without intentional skirting of the standards/rules/law?)

The biggest problem IMO is there's rarely any justice at all, even in those cases where there's incontrovertible evidence of guilt. Instant justice would be nice, but delayed justice would be FAR preferable to no justice, which is the current situation. How many recent killings of unarmed men have gone completely unaddressed? Far too many to count.
The system is set up in such a way that those charged with prosecuting police have personal and professional relationships with them that deny impartiality in almost every case. That is why there's rarely any prosecution, and even when there is (usually because they are pressured into it by public outcry) they blatantly throw the case in the toilet with no consequence....and there's still no justice.

Well, the level of incompetence required for this to be 'accidental' is SOOO incredibly high that it's not reasonable to assume the police are that incompetent....but if they are, that's intentional on the part of their supervisors, no? So still the responsibility of the police as a whole.

There IS doubt that they could have killed him and made it look unintentional. He shot 3 times, and only hit once. Clearly, he's not a good enough shot to kill on the first shot, because cops ALWAYS shoot to kill, and he failed, no matter which target he was aiming at.

We can assume that because he said "I don't know" when asked why he shot the caregiver....not "I missed", or "I wasn't aiming at you" or any other mitigation. If, as you suggest, he was firing at the sitting, unarmed, severely mentally challenged man (also completely inexcusable, btw) then the negligence in discharging his firearm with an innocent victim between him and the target is not just gross negligence, it's intentional negligence. Shooting someone because you don't care that they are between you and your target makes you an attempted murderer. Period.

Um....if a cop was shot in the foot, medical care would be instant, there would be no handcuffing, much less TRIPPLE handcuffing. What was reported was they didn't call for medical attention for >15 minutes while the victim lay handcuffed bleeding in the street (probably with officers standing on top of him). Medical care was provided while the shootings were still happening in Dallas, so "the scene wasn't secured yet, we couldn't allow medics in safely" falls completely flat as an excuse anymore and won't even be considered by me.

That level of incompetence from a police officer MUST, by definition, be intentional. They are well trained and equipped to avoid exactly this kind of fiasco. Ignoring that training is intentional, and that must be prosecutable if there is to be any effect. I don't have to ascribe intent to murder to claim culpability. That is not the metric by which the law is applied. If your actions are grossly negligent and end in near death of another, which is the absolute least criminal possible interpretation of the actions of this officer, that's criminal attempted murder/manslaughter1. Because (inappropriately) using a firearm is not unintentional, and officers ONLY use them to kill, this was not attempted manslaughter, which only applies when the intent is NOT to kill, it was an attempted murder.
Either way, that's a question for a jury to answer, not his superior, not the DA that he works with daily.

This is where our views part: I am not ready to ascribe malice to what can be explained by incompetence. I am not willing to do so without something more to go on. I think this sort of sensationalism can be dangerous and polarizing.

There's no doubt that these two cops could have killed the caregiver had they the intent. Even just the cop that fired, had he really wanted to, could have killed the victim, easily. The fact that they did not do so doesn't exonerate them from all wrong doing, but it does stand in the face of your charges of attempted murder.

If three shots were fired, and only one of them hit the victim, why do we assume that he was firing at the caregiver, and not the other fellow? Either way, most shots missed, and we can see the prone man was between the sitting man and the shooting man. Horrible idea to be firing, but to ascribe motive at this point is to get ahead of yourself. Negligence seems more likely.

As for the delay in medical care, there are a lot of assumptions being made it seems. Where was he shot? Was he bleeding profusely? How many of those 15 minutes passed before medics were even on the scene? The cufffing is clearly a bad idea in this case, but also sounds like protocol, which can hardly be maintained constitutes attempted murder.

That is why it is damaging to jump to conclusions early. We can say that the shooting was clearly unjust and unjustified. We can say that the officer clearly acted incompetent in his job, causing significant harm to an innocent. Beyond that you're straying into the mind reading business.

Sweet Zombie Jesus.

Those cops damn well better be convicted of attempted murder. If they aren't, it's going to be totally open season on anyone in blue. What unbelievable murderous fuckers.

Why in the fuck did they pull their guns on them? Black man in public?
There was never a gun, no cop ever saw a gun, no cop saw him move, no cop helped him after he was shot 3 times, instead they handcuffed him for being shot and withheld treatment (in the hope he might bleed to death?). I saw at least 2 men there that did have guns, and they absolutely used them to try to murder another person....why is no one shooting them, if 'man with gun' is a reason to shoot someone, shoot them.

Shoot first, ask questions later. That's the clear unambiguous MO of the cops....if they ever ask questions at all...so that's how people should be responding to cops, (right?)...shoot first, then handcuff them, then let them bleed out on the street.....if they survive, blame them for the shooting and claim self defense, after all, they are armed and clearly dangerous. (Sounds pretty terrible put that way, huh?)
It's at the point where I understand why cops are outright murdering any cop killers and not even trying to arrest them, they know that no jury will convict a black man of cop killing, it's arguably self defense every time. I also totally understand the feelings of the ambushers. Cops have brought this on themselves with their own actions, and complete lack of action prosecuting their own crimes. At this point, it's kill or be killed, so totally understandable to shoot first if a cop shows up.

If they don't take severe action against every cop involved in this instance, there's going to be more cop killings. It's a certainty, and actually appropriate IMO. Self defense is the right of every citizen, not just cops. I have zero sympathy for recently murdered cops, and won't until there's more cops killed than there are unarmed citizens killed by cops.
I would never convict a cop killer in today's climate....and I'm not alone. Cops are begging for a race war, and doing all they can to ensure one starts.

Oh FFS! You're told to stop...fucking stop! You won't get run over if you're not running. You won't get dealt with if you don't rob someone's house. Bleeding heart BS.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the referendum is not legally binding, is it?

So what happens if the plebs vote in favor of Brexit?

Brussels dispatches men in finely-tailored suits to London, with goodies in their suitcases. Politicians become supremely motivated to convince the plebs of the wrongness of their views -- or they take their continental brethren as an example and just ignore the plebs altogether.

Jokes aside, it might very well be a vote to leave a sinking ship.

Anyone here really think the EU can survive the groupthink-induced fixation on austerity? Anyone seen the economics data coming from Italy lately? Greece? Spain? France? Anyone think Italy can be in a single currency with Germany under German control? Anyone think the EU can survive the fall of the Euro or the departure of significant member countries?

The way I see it, the EU cannot survive economic orthodoxy. Greece is dying, Italy is bleeding from every orifice. Even as a strong supporter of a unified Europe, including Russia(!), I cannot support the EU in its current form -- it's rotten to the core and dominated by groupthink.

And with all that in mind, the fact still remains that the EU kept the Tories somewhat in check in many regards. What a disheartening situation...

I ask that same question constantly "then why is my butt bleeding"?

Oh look another regressive leftist conservative oversimplifying a complicated issue. Apparently if you don't treat the refugees like a grandma terrorist trying to cross the road destroy America, then you're a right wing racist islamophobe stupid bleeding heart Liberal.

I used to think of myself as left wing right wing. But not since it's become synonymous with stupidity.

That's how easy it is to flip what you just said and it sounds just as accurate.

Talent will get you so far.
So will hard work and practice.

Want to be great? you need both.

Talent is meaningless without the dedication to build on it. Likewise (sadly) you can practice til you bleed, but you'll never overcome your innate lack of ability (I know, I've tried).

This girl clearly has both. Now, she just needs to dial it back a notch on the fills and let her groove show. Remember, the musicians serve the song, not the other way round.

I've heard it reported as being a python, and that looks correct to me in the video.

With regards to "is it deadly?", the answer is no -- pythons are not venomous. They kill via clamping down with a lot of sharp teeth (image) to prevent escape and then constricting/squeezing.

No vital stuff in the nose and not enough veins or arteries to bleed out. Probably hurt like a mofo, though! And she may need some work done on the nose.

Wait, a sexy g****y* costume? Has she even seen traditional Romani garb?

(*Holy shit this is the first time I've ever seen gypsy censored out - I mean, it's obviously racist and antiquated, but I've always seen it as more akin to 'colored' - racist and antiquated and shouldn't be used, but not so offensive that it makes your ears bleed if you accidentally hear it)