The Jim Bakker Show

Shooting of unarmed black man in Florida heightens calls for police review

By Zachary Fagenson

NORTH MIAMI, Fla. (Reuters) – The shooting by police of an unarmed black man as he lay on the ground with his hands in the air in North Miami, Florida, raised calls on Thursday for U.S. police to review their training programs and policies.

Behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey was shot on Monday as he tried to get an autistic patient back to a nearby group home from which he had wandered. A cell phone video showed Kinsey with his hands extended above his chest moments before a bullet struck his leg.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said the incident showed more police training was needed, particularly for situations involving people with disabilities.

“We are grateful that both Mr. Kinsey and his patient are alive, but without changes in policy and improved training of officers, we will very likely see more needless shootings and deaths at the hands of police,” Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement.

North Miami Police Chief Gary Eugene said on Thursday that an investigation into the shooting would be conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement at his request.

Kinsey’s lawyer, Hilton Napoleon of the firm Rasco Klock Perez & Nieto in Coral Gables, Florida, sent the video to Reuters on Thursday. Napoleon did not provide information about who filmed it. Neither he nor Kinsey were immediately available for comment.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Thursday the U.S. Justice Department was gathering information about the incident, the latest controversial shooting of a black man by police in the United States.

Kinsey told Miami’s WSVN-TV that he was trying to calm the autistic patient when police showed up on Monday evening. Media reports have said Kinsey is 47 years old.

Kinsey said he dropped to the ground and lay on his back with his hands up and open to comply with commands from the police officers.

“As long as I’ve got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking,” Kinsey said in an interview with WSVN-TV from a hospital bed on Wednesday. “Wow, was I wrong.”

Kinsey said he kept his hands up throughout the incident and that he asked the officer, “Sir, why did you shoot me?”

“He said, ‘I don’t know.'”

Police said in a statement that the officers were responding to an emergency call about an armed man threatening suicide. They said the officer, who has not been identified, is on administrative leave according to standard procedures.

The shooting itself was not recorded, but in the video, which has been widely circulated on social media, Kinsey can be heard talking to his patient and police while lying flat in the street.

“All he has is a toy trunk in his hands … I am a behavior therapist at a group home,” Kinsey yelled in the video. He also urged his patient, who was sitting nearby, to lie down and be still. The autistic man told him to “shut up” and did not comply.

Clint Bower, chief executive for the Miami Achievement Center for the Developmentally Disabled, which runs the group home where Kinsey has worked for more than a year, said, “My employee saved that young man’s life.”

The United States has seen demonstrations from coast to coast over the use of excessive force by police, especially toward black men.

In the past month there have been deadly shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota and eight police officers have been killed in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

Police in North Miami have offered few details about the shooting. Chief Eugene told reporters that officers had responded to the scene with the threat of a gun in mind, but no gun was recovered.

“There are many questions about what happened on Monday night,” he said. “I assure you we will get all the answers.”

Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokeswoman Molly Best said the agency would not comment on the shooting.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien, Colleen Jenkins and Michelle Gershberg; Writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

Video shows man with hands up before Florida police shooting

y Zachary Fagenson

NORTH MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) – An employee of a group home who was shot by police in North Miami, Florida, said he was more worried about his autistic patient than himself before he felt the sting of a bullet in his leg.

Behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey told WSVN-TV in Miami on Wednesday that he was trying to calm the man, who had run away from the home on Monday when police showed up. Kinsey was on his back with his hands up and open to comply with the commands of the officers, who according to a police statement were responding to a 911 call about an armed man threatening suicide.

“As long as I’ve got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking,” Kinsey said in an interview from his hospital bed on Wednesday. “Wow, was I wrong.”

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Thursday the Justice Department was gathering information about the incident, the latest in a series of controversial shootings of black men by police in the United States.

Kinsey said he told police he was unarmed and there was no need for guns. He told WSVN-TV he kept his hands up throughout the incident and that he asked the officer, “Sir, why did you shoot me?”

“He said, ‘I don’t know,'” Kinsey said.

The officer, who has not been named, is on administrative leave per standard procedure, the department said.

Cellphone video showing Kinsey with his hands high before police opened fire emerged online on Wednesday, sparking new outrage. The shooting itself was not recorded.

In the video, Kinsey can be heard talking to both his patient and police while prone in the street.

“All he has is a toy trunk in his hands … I am a behavior therapist at a group home,” Kinsey yells. He also urges his patient, who is sitting nearby, to lie down and be still.

The autistic man tells him to “shut up” and does not comply.

Videos in the past year of such shootings or their aftermath in cities including North Charleston, South Carolina; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota have spurred protests over use of force against minorities by police. The Baton Rouge and St. Paul incidents were followed by attacks that killed eight police officers.

Police in North Miami have offered few details about the latest incident. Police Chief Gary Eugene told reporters on Thursday he had asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to lead the investigation.

Eugene said officers responded to the scene with the threat of a gun in mind but no gun was recovered.

“There are many questions about what happened on Monday night,” the chief said. “I assure you we will get all the answers.”

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien, Colleen Jenkins and Michelle Gershberg; Writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Bill Trott)

Multiple Police officers shot, 3 dead in Baton Rouge this morning

Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,

By Joseph Penney

BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) – Three police officers were shot to death and several others wounded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday, the city’s mayor said, as the country remained on edge in the wake of police shootings of black men and the killings of five Dallas officers.

The officers in Baton Rouge were responding to a call of shots fired when they were ambushed by at least one gunman, Mayor Kip Holden told NBC News. A gunman was shot but his condition was not clear, a Louisiana State Police official told NBC.

A spokesman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office said police and sheriff’s deputies were involved in the shooting incident. “Multiple officers from both agencies sustained injuries and were transported to local hospitals,” he said in an email. He said there were no firm numbers on the number hurt or the extent of injuries.

While the scene of the shootings was contained, police warned residents to stay away from the area, near Airline Highway, which is a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of protesters were arrested earlier this month..

Two nearby hospitals were on lockdown, CBS reported. Efforts to confirm the report were not immediately successful.

The reports come a week after a wave of protests against police violence in Baton Rouge and other cities after a 37-year-old African-American father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers. At one of the demonstrations in Dallas, a gunman opened fire on white officers assigned to the protest, killing five of them.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Ian Simpson, Tim Gardne and Julia Edwards in Washington; Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by David Evans and Mary Milliken)

Five people suspected of shooting at police arrested in Washington DC

(Reuters) – Five people suspected of shooting at police officers before barricading themselves inside a vehicle in Washington D.C. were arrested on Tuesday, police said.

No one was reported injured in the incident, which took place days after five police officers were fatally shot during a demonstration in Dallas to protest at police violence against black men and other minorities.

In the incident in Washington D.C., officers in marked patrol cars were responding to reports of gunshots just after midnight in the southeast of the city when at least one person inside a parked SUV opened fire on the patrol cars, a spokeswoman with the Metropolitan Police Department said.

The officers returned fire, the spokeswoman said, and the five suspects – three women and two men – hid inside the vehicle during a 30-minute standoff before surrendering.

It was not immediately clear why the suspects fired at police or what criminal charges they might face.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Gunmen take hostages at cafe in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter

DHAKA (Reuters) – Gunmen attacked a restaurant popular with expatriates in the diplomatic quarter of the Bangladeshi capital on Friday and took hostages, including several foreigners, police said.

Eight to nine gunmen attacked the Holey Artisan restaurant in the upscale Gulshan area of Dhaka, and police were preparing to start an operation to rescue the hostages, said Benjir Ahmed, the chief of Bangladesh’s special police force.

CNN said 20 people were being held in the restaurant.

Ahmed said the assailants had hurled bombs at police. One policeman was dead and two others wounded by gunfire that erupted as they surrounded the restaurant, police said.

A resident near the scene of the attack said he could hear sporadic gunfire nearly three hours after the attack began. “It is chaos out there. The streets are blocked. There are dozens of police commandos,” said Tarique Mir.

Bangladesh has seen an increase in militant Islamist violence over the last year. Deadly attacks have been mounted against atheists and members of religious minorities in the mostly Muslim country of 160 million people, with attackers often using machetes.

Militants killed two foreigners last year, leading several Western firms involved in the country’s $25 billion garment sector to temporarily halt visits to Dhaka.

Both Islamic State and al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for militant attacks in the country. But the government denies foreign militant organizations are involved and blames two local groups, Ansar-al-Islam and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen.

The U.S. State Department said all Americans working at the U.S. mission there had been accounted for. A spokesman said in Washington the situation was “very fluid, very live”.

(Reporting by Serajul Quadir; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Police shoot dead masked man who took hostages in German cinema

German special police during hostage situation

By Ralf Banser

VIERNHEIM, Germany (Reuters) – A masked man took hostages at a cinema in western Germany on Thursday before police stormed the complex and shot him dead, police said.

No other people were injured, a police spokesman said.

The attacker, who carried a rifle or “long gun”, acted alone and appeared to have been a “disturbed man”, the interior minister of Hesse state, Peter Beuth, told the regional parliament.

Police had not identified the man or established his motive, spokesman Bernd Hochstaedter said, adding that nothing immediately pointed to him having a militant background.

German television showed pictures of heavily-armed police, wearing helmets and body armor, storming the Kinopolis complex in Viernheim, south of Frankfurt, and a couple fleeing the building.

Cinema employee Guri Blakaj told Reuters the gunman, who appeared to be aged between 18 and 25 and was about 1.7 meters tall, entered the cinema at around 3 p.m. and told workers to get into an office.

He then went into a cinema theater. Blakaj, who said there were about six workers and 30 cinemagoers in the building, then heard shots fired.

Police special forces stormed the building and shot him.

There was still a heavy police presence at the scene into the late afternoon, and a helicopter circled overhead.

(Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers, Michael Nienaber and Sabine Siebold; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Louisiana officer shot and killed during pedestrian stop

(Reuters) – A Louisiana sheriff’s deputy died of gunshot wounds on Wednesday after being shot three times in the back by a pedestrian he had stopped in a high-crime suburb of New Orleans, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office said.

Sheriff Newell Normand told reporters at a late night news conference that deputy David F. Michel, Jr., 50, got into a struggle with the suspect around noon local time, believing the man was following another individual.

Normand said the suspect, identified as 19-year-old Jerman Neveaux, pulled a revolver and fired a total of three shots into Michel’s back during the confrontation.

Michel, a detective who was assigned to a street crimes unit, died at a local hospital.

“David, I wish I had 1,000 of him,” an emotional Normand said, adding that the shooting was “a cold-blooded murder.”

Neveaux fled into the surrounding neighborhood and was later apprehended.

Bystander video published online by local broadcaster FOX8 showed two of several officers striking a prone Neveaux more than a dozen times as he is arrested, footage which Normand said his office would investigate.

Neveaux was treated for minor injuries at a hospital. Normand said Neveaux admitted to the shooting, saying he was on probation and did not want to go to jail for possessing a firearm.

Michel worked as a reserve deputy for the department starting in 2007 and became a full-time deputy in February of 2013, the office said.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang and Sandra Maler)

Full Orlando 911 transcript released; gunman pledged allegiance to Islamic State

Makeshift memorial for victims of Pulse shooting

By Barbara Liston

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department and the FBI on Monday released what they said was the complete transcript of the phone conversation between the Orlando, Florida, shooter and 911 police operators as he threatened to strap explosives to his hostages.

The release of the full transcript came a few hours after the FBI had issued an edited transcript of the calls.

In the full transcript, the gunman, Omar Mateen, is quoted pledging allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Mateen, 29, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida on June 12, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. He threatened to detonate a car rigged with bombs and to strap hostages into explosive vests, according to transcripts of the 911 calls he made while police tried to rescue people trapped in the club.

The FBI and Justice Department said they had released a redacted transcript of the conversations because of sensitivity to the interests of survivors and victims’ families, and the integrity of the investigation.

But the first transcript led U.S. House of Representative Speaker Paul Ryan and other politicians to call for the release of a full transcript after a political battle over gun violence brewed in the U.S. Congress.

Mateen’s conversations with a dispatcher and crisis negotiators were made public as police sought to fend off criticism that they may have acted too slowly to end a three-hour standoff at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

“You people are gonna get it and I’m gonna ignite it if they try to do anything stupid,” Mateen said during one of the calls, according to the FBI transcript.

(Additional reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Frank McGurty in New York, and Eric Beech, Mohammad Zargham and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Writing by Fiona Ortiz and Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bill Trott)

U.S. to reveal details of Orlando nightclub gunman’s 911 calls

(Reuters) – U.S. authorities were due on Monday to release partial transcripts of 911 calls made during last week’s mass shooting by a gunman who slaughtered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, before being killed by police.

Omar Mateen, 29, is said to have paused during a three-hour siege to telephone emergency dispatchers three times and to post internet messages from inside the Pulse nightclub professing his support for Islamist militant groups.

The FBI was due to hold a news conference near the club at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to provide an update on the investigation and to release the partial transcripts of the 911 calls.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said they would include the “substance of his conversations” recorded as Mateen carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but not any pledge of loyalty he is alleged to have made to the Islamic State militant group.

Authorities have said preliminary evidence indicates Mateen, who worked as a security guard, was a mentally disturbed individual who acted alone and without direction from outside networks.

Lynch, who is due to visit Orlando on Tuesday, told CNN on Sunday that investigators have been focused on building a full profile of Mateen, a New York-born U.S. citizen and Florida resident of Afghan descent, who has been described by U.S. officials as “self-radicalized” in his extremist sympathies.

The Pulse massacre, which also left 53 people wounded, led to a week of national mourning and soul-searching over access to firearms and the vulnerability to hate crimes of people in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

While in Orlando, Lynch will meet with investigators, as well as survivors and loved ones of the victims.

The massacre has triggered an effort to break a long-standing stalemate in Congress over gun control.

The Senate was set to vote on Monday on four competing measures – two from Democrats and two from Republicans – to expand background checks on gun buyers and curb gun sales for people on terrorism watch lists.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 presidential election, has said he shares the goal of keeping guns out of the hands of people on watch lists.

Trump said on Monday he was referring to security staff, not patrons, when he said that if more people had been armed in the nightclub, fewer would have died.

(Reporting by David Lawder in Washington and Roselle Chen in Orlando; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bill Trott)

Boko Haram shoot dead 18 women at funeral in northern Nigeria

YOLA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Boko Haram militants have shot dead 18 women at a funeral in Nigeria’s northeast, rampaging through a village, setting houses on fire and shooting at random, witnesses and local government officials said on Friday.

The attack took place at about 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) on Thursday in the village of Kuda in Adamawa State. Resident Moses Kwagh told Reuters that people waited until three hours after the attack and had then counted 18 women’s bodies.

Some women were still missing, he said.

A police source confirmed the attack but said it was not yet clear how many people had been killed. The military did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmaker Emmanuel Tsamdu told Reuters: “I am yet to get the details on how it happened and the real number of people killed. I have sent hunters to go to the area and get me the details because people are afraid to go to the village.”

Kuda is close to the Sambisa Forest, a vast colonial-era game reserve where Boko Haram militants hide in secluded camps to avoid the Nigerian military. The village was attacked by Boko Haram militants in February.

Under President Muhammadu Buhari’s command and aided by Nigeria’s neighbors, the army has recaptured most of the territory seized by Boko Haram, but the group still regularly stages guerrilla attacks.

“When we said that Boko Haram is still in this place some people sit in Abuja and claim that there is no more Boko Haram, but see what has happen,” Kwagh said.

(Reporting by Emma Ande; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Sign up for Jim Bakker Show