D. Till

He was lying flat on his back in the road with both hands in the air, shouting that he was a therapist and the man beside him was autistic and holding a toy truck. A policeman shot Charles Kinsey anyway. Kinsey asked him why. The officer said: "I don't know." North Miami, Florida, 18 July 2016. Kinsey, 47, was a behavioural therapist. One of his patients, Arnaldo Rios Soto, a 26-year-old autistic man, had wandered out of a group home and was sitting in the middle of the road playing with a silver toy truck. Someone called 911 and reported a man with a gun threatening to kill himself. Kinsey did everything. He lay down in the road on his back. He put both hands straight up in the air where they could be seen. He shouted his identification, his job, his patient's condition, and that the object was a toy. It is on video. A SWAT officer fired three rounds. One hit Kinsey in the leg. Then he was rolled over and handcuffed, bleeding in the road, and left there for a reported twenty minutes before an ambulance got to him. He asked the officer why he had shot him. He has testified that the answer was: *I don't know.* The officer, Jonathan Aledda, said he had been trying to protect Kinsey and believed Rios Soto was armed and a threat. He was charged — which is itself unusual — and tried twice. The first trial produced a conviction on one count of culpable negligence. A judge threw it out. A second jury acquitted him in 2019. Nobody has been held responsible. Kinsey survived and gave interviews, and the sentence he keeps returning to is the one everybody should take from this. He was unarmed, flat on his back, hands up, announcing himself, in daylight, on camera. He did everything right, and it did not matter. Every Black parent in America who has ever recited the rules to a teenager — hands visible, say sir, do not move, announce what you are doing — has had to reckon with Charles Kinsey, because he followed all of them, perfectly, out loud, and was shot anyway.