Pak Sahafat – Every year in the United States, about a thousand citizens are victims of police brutality and die from police shootings, so that between 6 and 8 thousand people have been slaughtered since 2015.
Pak Sahafat News Agency: Although occupation and killing are one of the components of American militarism in the foreign sphere, but with a brief look at the police case of this country regarding the way citizens are treated, other violent behaviors of the American military and security forces are revealed.
According to the published information, every year around 1000 people are killed by the police in this country. In other words, at least three people die at the hands of the police every day; Figures that have been increasing year by year.
The acceleration of the US police killing machine
Looking at the number of people killed by the American police, we come to the point that the year 2022 has broken the record of previous years. Recently, the “Police Violence Monitoring” group announced in a report that the police killed 1,176 people in 2022, which is the highest number since 2013.
It is interesting to note that the year 2021 also saw a record number of police killings, and the number of victims in that year – although it was 40 less than in 2022 – reached 1,136 cases, which was unprecedented until then.
Years before that, the number of people killed was estimated between 900 and 1000, although the American newspaper “Washington Post” has been collecting data on the killing of citizens by the American police since 2015. Since The Washington Post began tracking fatal police shootings in 2015, officers have shot and killed 247 women, out of a total of more than 5,600 people killed.
In a recent report published by the New York Times, it has been emphasized that 8,102 people have been killed by the police during this period, which is about 2,500 more than the statistics provided by the Washington Post.
The tragedy of the serial killing of black people
In America, although blacks were slaves in the beginning, despite extensive struggles, they were still not placed in the same position as whites, and today they are considered as second and third class citizens.
The confrontation of blacks with discrimination continued after the Second World War and specifically in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when the American economic situation improved and moved towards prosperity. At this time, measures to eliminate slavery and racism became a little more serious. This is the period when the likes of Malcolm X, the black human rights activist and African American rights defender, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the most well-known speaker and leader of the African American civil rights movement, gained power.
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Until this time, racism was strongly prevalent in American society. This process, which first showed itself in the form of slavery, racism and the classification and division of people, continued until several movements were formed simultaneously against it.
Despite the successes achieved by blacks during decades of political, social and legal struggles, they are always systematically suppressed, so that the serial killing of blacks by the American police has become one of the enduring tragedies of this country.
In 2014, the shooting of 18-year-old “Michael Brown” in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, USA, sparked unrest in various cities of this country. Brown was black, unarmed, and Sue had no record, but he was shot six times by the racist police.
Incidentally, the same year, 43-year-old Eric Garner was also a black man who was killed by several police officers due to the compression of his neck and chest. Interestingly, the policemen who killed him were acquitted, and this led to a wave of public protests across the United States.
Two years ago (2020), a similar incident in this country that claims human rights, caused unrest in America, and this time it was the victim of “George Floyd”; A 46-year-old black and unarmed man died when his neck was placed under the knee of a white policeman and he repeated the phrase “I can’t breathe”; A sad incident that was not the first and will not be the last; An event that became a platform for violent protests in at least 75 American cities.
Racial and ethnic discrimination in America by the police and security forces against the black community is evident even in the statistics published by the Census Bureau of this country. Figures related to fatal police shootings show that African-Americans are far more likely to be fatally shot than whites and Hispanics compared to their overall population.
Although African Americans make up less than 14 percent of the U.S. population, they account for about 24 percent of fatal police shootings since 2015. Further research shows that unarmed black people in the United States are more than three times more likely to be fatally shot by police than white people.
Also, the number of African-Americans who are arrested for drug use is much higher than that of whites. While studies show that drugs are used at similar levels between whites and blacks.
In 2018, about 750 out of every 100,000 African-Americans were arrested for drug use, compared to about 350 out of every 100,000 white Americans. National surveys on drug use show that whites use drugs at similar rates, but African-Americans are still more likely to be arrested.
Additionally, according to the most recent data, African-Americans are five times as likely to be incarcerated as white Americans and twice as often as Hispanic Americans.
In 2019, African-Americans made up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but accounted for nearly a third of the nation’s incarcerated population. Although white Americans make up more than 60% of the total population of the United States, they account for only about 30% of the prison population.
The end of the word
The roots of racism in America are so deep that traces of this behavior can always be seen at different levels of American society, from legislation to implementation.
Therefore, white people, judges and police interpret the laws in America in such a way that there are traces of racial discrimination in it. American security agents and law enforcement have a pessimistic and discriminatory view of blacks, so that many security measures and police inspections are aimed at the black community.
In sum, violence against the black minority in America has been institutionalized over the past centuries, and this violence has taken root not only in the treatment of the police but also in various forms in the laws, organizations and institutions of the United States. Even the reliance of “Barack Obama”, a black person, on the presidency of this country for eight years, could not eradicate this institutionalized violence.