There's Something Disturbing About The Way Cops Act Just After They've Shot Somebody

The ubiquity of cellphone, dashcam and surveillance video has transformed the way the public understands police violence. But as scene after scene unfolds on shaky screens and in grainy contours, another element of the violence is beginning to come into focus: the pattern of officers showing no concern for the person they have shot, often fatally.

The nonchalance around the injured and the dying is stunning in its own way.

Set aside the question of whether the shooting was justified, either legally or morally. Perhaps it was. Perhaps the officer had no other choice. Even in such a situation, though, the officer has just exercised the most terrifying of powers the use of lethal force against another human being. And yet no care is taken of that human being.

Consider the most recent shooting caught on video: that of Charles Kinsey, who fortunately survived. Kinsey, a black behavioral therapist in North Miami, was trying to help a man with autism who was sitting in the street blocking traffic. A cellphone video shows Kinsey himself lying on the ground with his hands in the air. He was trying to explain to police that the other man had a toy truck and not a gun, contrary to what a 911 caller had reported .

One of the officers fired three times, shooting Kinsey in the leg. Then he said he was handcuffed and left bleeding on the street for 20 minutes before an ambulance arrived.

And this was a case in which the police understood, right from the start, that the man they shot was the victim.

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Letting the body lie there is a fairly common trend in these high-profile police shootings. After Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police shot and killed Alton Sterling , a 37-year-old black man, on July 5, the officers appeared rattled by what had happened. But as for Sterling, they said to just leave him , according to a witness.

In Ferguson, Missouri, officers left Mike Browns body in the street for four hours , an indignity that protesters have referred to often.

Cedrick Chatman was shot four times, within 10 seconds, as he ran from officers on the south side of Chicago. Then they handcuffed the dying teen, and an officer placed his boot on top of him .

After officers shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the child was still alive. Even when they realized he was just a kid with a toy gun, they still failed to offer basic medical assistance. (They have since said they thought his toy gun was real and were afraid for their lives.) Instead, when his 14-year-old sister, T.R., ran toward him crying out, My baby brother, they killed my baby brother, one of the officers tackled her . She tried to get up and crawl toward her dying brother, but the second officer dragged her down. She was handcuffed and put in the backseat of a car, left to watch her brother continue to bleed while the officers did nothing.

When Tamirs mother, Samaria Rice, heard about the shooting and rushed to the park, the officers refused to release T.R. into her custody and told her she had to choose between going to the hospital with her fatally wounded 12-year-old son and staying with her handcuffed 14-year-old daughter, who was in the back of the car with the very same officers who had shot her son, the Rice familys lawyers have since written .

On Dec. 28, an Ohio grand jury chose not to indict the officer who fatally shot Tamir.