Many of you have probably heard about a police shooting an unarmed therapist in the leg while he was trying to help his patient with special needs. The victim still lives, fortunately, but the patient has faced serious trauma. When seeing security guards Arnaldo, the adult patient with autism, raised his arms to show he had no weapons. His mother states, "His injuries are long-lasting injuries because he doesn't have a method in which to heal." Arnaldo had been sitting in the street playing with his toy truck while his therapist, Kinsey, was trying to calm him. When the police came up he lay down on his back, attempting to explain Arnaldo did not have a weapon. Then, after being shot in the leg multiple times, the police officers handcuffed both him and his patient.
When thought to be a crime that occurred on account of Kinsey's race, the police officer said, that instead, he was trying to shoot the Arnaldo fearing he was trying to hurt the therapist, despite the fact that the latter was trying to explain Arnaldo was harmless. This not only shows he was not listening to the therapist, but also implies that the man with autism's life has less worth. Arnaldo's family attorney states, "To say that we didn't mean to shoot the African-American guy, we meant to shoot the guy with the 'disability' makes the person's life worth nothing." The police seemed to think it would be better to say he shot a man with special needs, when that would have been just as horrible. What matters in this case is not why the officer shot, but that someone was shot who had no reason to be.
It could have been Robb, who has sat in the street refusing to get up like Arnaldo before, and to think that him or any of his therapists who work so hard every day to help him could have been emotionally or physically injured makes me irate. Officers need to be trained to stop shooting people based on fear, and they need to think rationally and "assess the situation properly to make sure innocent people are not hurt." We cannot undo what happened, but we can learn from it, and we can hope if something like this happens again we will have a better outcome.
