Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump assails Miami police for shooting Black man with mental health issues

The police-involved shooting last month of a Black Miami man — whose mother said she called 911 because her son was having a mental health crisis — represents yet another disturbing example of how police officers fail to handle such emergency calls for help and routinely impose criminal charges to justify using lethal force, said Ben Crump, an attorney representing the victim and who has worked on some of the nation’s most racially charged cases. “It’s like smoke and mirrors,” Crump told WLRN’s South Florida Roundup host Tim Padgett in an interview broadcast Friday. “Let’s go charge [the Black victim] so nobody will be talking about charging the police officer,” he said. “Then they try to assassinate the [Black victim’s] character with trumped up charges and trying to air out any negative thing they can.” “We’ve experienced this in the Black community far too often, especially in the greater Liberty City area of Miami, where blacks are routinely profiled, and then have their constitutional rights violated in the most egregious ways,” Crump told WLRN. The latest police-involved shooting happened around 2:45 p.m. on March 7 when the mother of 47-year-old Donald Armstrong called 911 because her son was having a...