Violence and racial discrimination dominate US police force

World
Europe

03:54

Police violence against African Americans is common in the US. Reports of many high-profile police brutality cases have shown that police shootings can be allegedly justified, and that it's their black victims who are on the wrong side, regardless of circumstances.

Police officers are entrusted with upholding justice and the law, however, in the US, they instead violate the rights of the weak. Decades after the struggles of the civil rights movement, there seems no end to the deadly effects of discrimination in a divided society.

Police officer Jason Stockley shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith, a black man, after a high-speed car chase in 2011.

"An urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly," said the judge last September in defense of Jason Stockley, even after investigators found only Stockley’s DNA on the gun and none of Smith’s.

Philando Castile was shot dead by police on July 6, 2016.

“The police are here to kill us because we are black,” screamed Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was a witness to her boyfriend's murder.

After the fatal police shootings of Philando Castile and another black man Alton Sterling, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech on July 7, 2016.

"These are not isolated incidents. They're symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system," Obama said.

According to the Washington Post, police in the US shot 987 people dead in 2017, and the Guardian reported that, in 2016, black males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely to be killed by police officers than other Americans.

“Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching,” said a UN report, which is based on a visit to the US in January 2016.