A Brutal Society

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As if more examples were needed, the gunning down of a child in Cleveland for brandishing a toy pistol has again clearly demonstrated that in American society, the life of a black person isn't worth much.

Even if the child had stolen a real gun from his household — which, considering the arsenals legally kept in American homes, would be neither unusual nor rare — the police would have had other alternatives available to them short of gunning him down in cold blood. The United States presents itself to the world as the land of freedom and liberty. In reality, American society is fundamentally sick.

It's probably anything but normal that blacks — who make up 13 percent of the total U.S. population — only hold 9 percent of all undergraduate college degrees, while they make up over 40 percent of the prison population. They are prisoners of poverty.

Sure, in this country a black man can be elected president, become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or chief justice of the Supreme Court, but the majority of them work as janitors, security guards or in service occupations. For countless others that are unemployed, have always been unemployed and in all likelihood will never be employed, the future holds nothing for them other than a bleak existence in a decaying and violent ghetto.

http://watchingamerica.com/WA/2014/12/05/a-brutal-society/

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1. Plenty of Unfair Cases in America

Decades ago, when I was just a kid, I remember hearing an American government spokesperson criticizing foreign governments on human rights on the radio. I thought at the time, why didn’t foreign governments criticize America’s own shortcomings on the issue of racism?

Now that I work as a lawyer, I often think to myself, why do American legal scholars always use emulation of the American system as the standard when evaluating other countries? America’s murder rate is 12 times higher than Japan’s, six times higher than Germany’s, five times higher than China’s and four times higher than England’s. What is worth imitating here?

Let’s take a look at the rights of the defendant in America! Some believe that a so-called fair trial is more important than arresting and punishing real criminals. America has a law [that prohibits] the jury from hearing about the defendant’s other crimes and allegations — the reason being that if the jury heard about the murder defendant’s other horrific crimes (such as rape or theft), that jury might assume the defendant is guilty, even if he didn’t commit the murder in question and the jury could wrongfully indict him. The facts prove that this principle has many flaws and has led to many wrong verdicts. For example, a Baltimore man named Nelson Bernard Clifford was accused of rape six times, but acquitted four times.

No country is perfect, nor is there a system and society that always handles things perfectly. America is no different. If countries could interfere in each other’s business, then for some problems, Asian governments could actually pressure America for improvements, i.e., American universities’ discrimination against Chinese and Asian-American students. According to a Princeton University professor’s research, in the college entrance exam where 1600 is a perfect score, Asian-American students have to score 140 points higher than white students to be accepted by the same school. Asian-American students make up a high percentage of the five most elite high schools in New York, such as the famous Stuyvesant High School, where Asian-American students are 72.5 percent of the student body. New York City Mayor [Bill] de Blasio actually demanded change in law and enrollment policies to lower the acceptance ratio of Asian-American students. The American Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, stopping Chinese laborers from coming into the U.S., and now Mayor de Blasio and many top American universities have actually created an academic Chinese Exclusion Act, making Asian-American students’ school acceptance harder than ever.

http://watchingamerica.com/WA/2014/12/02/plenty-of-unfair-cases-in-america/

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2. Bad Influences

In 1992, the American judicial system cleared the police officers accused of beating Rodney King, arrested for speeding in Los Angeles. This was followed by six days of rioting. Other instances of violence, highly publicized, caused outrage by demoralizing the black community: that in 2009 of a security officer found guilty of involuntary homicide, rather than murder, in the shooting death of a black man in Oakland; or the one in 2012, in Florida, when Trayvon Martin was shot down by a man who was finally acquitted of a murder charge. There is a distressing continuity with the latest events in Ferguson, this is obvious, but a large proportion of white Americans maintain the illusion, worsened by the election of Barack Obama, that the United States surmounted its racial conflicts a long time ago.

There are a flood of studies that have documented the racial bias of the American justice system and police corps against black people. A statistic brought up by the media in recent days indicates that a young black man is 21 times more likely to be shot by the police than a young white man. Even so, a Huffington Post/YouGov poll made public this week shows that only 22 percent of white responders believe that Officer Wilson was wrong to fire at young Brown — compared to 62 percent of African-American responders which, moreover, does not constitute a crushing majority.

The cultural roots of this racism run deep. Another study, conducted by Northwestern University, measures how much slavery and the construction of prejudice have led to a lasting dehumanization of black people in the minds of many white people, feeding reciprocal mistrust. In his testimony before the grand jury, Wilson did not demonstrate otherwise as he depicted Michael Brown with almost bestial qualities. St. Louis is an example among many others of the urban segregation that is rampant in several American cities, but it is true all the same that the social relationships between white and black people are, in daily life, healthier than they were in the 1960s. What remains is the immense challenge of uprooting the bad influences of the past on the institutional plane.

Ferguson has not helped this cause. If part of the solution is improving the faith of the black minority in the country’s institutions, and more specifically in the courts and police, it would be helpful if, in the future, the Robert McCullochs of the world were neutralized. The prosecutor in this case, Mr. McCulloch, was widely perceived by the black community as being in the service of the police, but he refused to step down in favor of a special prosecutor. Moreover, he supervised the grand jury very poorly and let his work drag on for three months, when it needn’t have lasted more than a few days, contributing thus to the climate of suspicion. In short, his presence contributed to a miscarriage of justice, emphasized The New York Times on Wednesday in its editorial.

http://watchingamerica.com/WA/2014/12/02/bad-influences/

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3. America needs a policing revolution

This week the White House launched a plan for fixing the broken relationship between law enforcement and minority communities. The move was a response to a spate of killings of black men by white police officers — most notably the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the choking of Eric Garner on Staten Island in New York. Both deaths have triggered civil rights investigations by the Department of Justice.

The problem, as President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have acknowledged, is a national one that extends well beyond the fates of those two men. But if the administration is serious about rebuilding the trust of minority communities in the legal system and police, its current proposals are not enough to help matters much.

Obama’s plan calls for investing $263 million in community policing, of which $75 million will be used to encourage police to employ body cameras. These devices are in vogue as a way to create an objective record of police-citizen encounters and find a way through the tangle of conflicting accounts that inevitably accompanies volatile incidents. Pilot programs show cameras can both curb police misconduct and protect officers against false accusations of abuse.

Much depends, however, on how they are used. Can officers turn them on and off at will? How long will recordings, which may take place in the privacy of homes, be kept? Will recordings be used only for police misconduct cases or if they contain evidence of a crime, or will they provide a backdoor for surveillance and tracking? Who will make sure that police are complying with the rules?

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/12/america-needs-a-policingrevolution.html