Heres the reality: police are shooting Americans in greater numbers -- and those numbers are surely weighted towards people of color. The individual cases pop up in the news -- a kid with a toy gun in Cleveland, an unarmed man who had done nothing whatsoever in a darkened project stairwell in New York, and of course most notoriously Michael Brown. TomDispatch author Chase Madar has some of the numbers over at the Nation today in his piece (see below), Why its impossible to indict a cop. But the point he makes couldnt be simpler or blunter: The law is firmly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civilians. And self-policing and self-regulation, as he points out, is a joke. Add to this the Pentagon-inspired militarization of American police forces (covered regularly at TomDispatch since 2004) -- their arming and dressing in ever more up-armored and militarized ways (combined of course with vets just back from the countrys distant no-rules battlefields, including former special ops guys, and the rise of militarized SWAT teams (along with rising home raids involving the increasing breaking down of American doors a la Afghanistan) and we have what could be called a situation. Worse yet, the response to all this is clearly going to be reforms that will end up giving the police more, not less, military training on the theory that, if they have more military-style equipment they should know how to use it. Its ugly and it ensures more Ferguson-like situations. Tom First, the big picture. Last year, the FBI tallied 461 “justifiable homicides” committed by law enforcement—justifiable because the Bureau assumes so, and the nation’s courts have not found otherwise. This is the highest number in two decades, even as the nation’s overall homicide rate continues to drop. Homicides committed by on-duty law enforcement make up 3 percent of the 14,196 homicides committed in the United States in 2013. A USA Today analysis of the FBI database found an average of about ninety-six police homicides a year in which a white officer kills a black person. The FBI’s police homicide stats are fuzzy, and they are surely an undercount, given that they come from voluntary reports to the FBI from police departments all over the country. That the federal government does not keep a strict national tally shows just how seriously it takes this problem. A crowdsourced database has sprung up to fill the gap, as has a wiki-tabulation. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about these police killings, many of them of unarmed victims, is that our courts find them perfectly legal. thenation/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop#
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 13:30:01 +0000
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