Why black men fear that any police encounter could go awry

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 a bullet 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.

"I see incidents with a white person with a gun on their hip and ... they don't pull their gun. They pull their Taser to calm them down," said Travis Haynes, 35, of Orlando, who is black. "But when it comes to a black man, the first thing they do is draw their gun."

On Monday in Florida, officers ordered Kinsey and the patient, who was sitting in the street playing with a toy truck, to lie on the ground. Kinsey, 47, got down on the pavement and put his hands up while trying to get the patient to comply, North Miami Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas told The Miami Herald.

An officer then fired three times, striking Kinsey in the leg, Cuevas said.