American Police Murder Far
More Americans Than Do Alleged Terrorists
Try to imagine any American
not protected by a police badge getting away with any of these killings.
Global Research, December 22, 2015
World Socialist Website 22 December 2015
Theme: Police
State & Civil Rights
At least 1,160 people have been killed by US police in
2015, according to an online
aggregator of police killings, exceeding last
year’s figure of 1,108. The statistics, compiled by killedbypolice.net, show
that the wave of police violence has only intensified despite nationwide mass
protests by tens of thousands this year against police brutality.
A more detailed database of killings by US police
beginning in January 2015 compiled by the Guardian newspaper,
which broadly corresponds with figures from killedbypolice.net, demonstrates
that the epidemic of police violence affects broad layers of the American
population from all ethnic backgrounds. While African-Americans were killed at
nearly 2.5 times the rate of whites, the total number of white victims of
police killings, 537 by the Guardian’s figures, was larger than the total
number of either black or Hispanic victims.
Eighteen people in the Guardian’s database
were minors. Two hundred-twelve people, or around one-fifth of all people
killed by police in 2015, were unarmed, and 40 were killed while in custody.
According to statistics kept by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, widely acknowledged to radically undercount the real number of
police killings, “justifiable homicides” by police officers have reached record
highs in recent years, while the number of police officers killed in the line
of duty has reached their lowest levels in decades. Thus, while it is
impossible to be certain due to the government’s refusal to compile accurate
data, it is highly likely that police killings for 2015 have been at or above
record levels.
On Saturday morning, police in Los Angeles beat and
tasered 26-year-old Ruben Herrera to death. Herrera had been diagnosed with
bipolar disorder. Just hours earlier, an off-duty cop in Baltimore shot and
killed Edel Cato Moreland for wielding a toy gun. In Amarillo, Texas on Sunday,
police shot and killed Mark Ramirez, a 31-year-old suicidal man, in his own
home, in what appears to be yet another police killing during a routine
“welfare check.”
Also over the weekend, Andrew Thomas, who was shot in the neck last month by a police officer in Paradise,
California after wrecking his car, died in a California hospital. Citing the
officer’s claim that the shooting was “accidental,” the district attorney in
that case declined to press charges, declaring the shooting “not justified, but
also not criminal.”
Yesterday the Guardian newspaper
released surveillance footage and an eyewitness account of the fatal shooting
in Chicago last June of 23-year-old Alfontish “Nunu” Cockerham, who police
claimed brandished a weapon at them. Video from a private security camera shows
Cockerham was unarmed at the time he was shot, and a pistol allegedly belonging
to him suddenly appearing on the ground several feet from where he was shot as
police closed in.
Also late Monday evening, a grand jury in Texas
decided not to return any indictments in the death of Sandra Bland, the
28-year-old black woman and police violence protester found dead in her cell in
Waller County, Texas, after being detained for three days following a routine
traffic stop. While police claimed that Bland had hanged herself with a plastic
trash bag, numerous holes in the police version of events suggest that Bland
was the victim of a police lynching, possibly due to her political views.
The ruling in Texas continues the nationwide trend of
grand juries refusing to indict police officers in murder cases, which have
often been deliberately manipulated by prosecutors in order to let police off
the hook.
Only in rare instances, such as when overwhelming
video evidence becomes public, have police officers been charged with any
crime. No officer in the most high-profile police killings that occurred in
2015, including those of Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Zachary Hammond, and
Sandra Bland, has been convicted.
Officers who were charged and later acquitted this
year include Chicago police officer Dante Servin, charged over the 2012
shooting death of Rekia Boyd; Cleveland officer Michael Brelo, who used his
“Marine training” in 2012 to unload dozens of rounds at two unarmed motorists
at point-blank range; and Chicago police commander Glenn Evans, acquitted last
week for an incident in which he jammed a gun down a suspect’s throat. With the
mistrial declared last week in the case of William Porter, charged for his role
in the Freddie Gray murder, the odds that some or all of the six officers in
that case will be acquitted are significantly raised.
The Obama administration has led the drive by the
political establishment to shield killer cops from prosecution. The White House
has sided with the police in every use of force case to appear before the
Supreme Court, and the Justice Department has not brought any charges against
officers in numerous civil rights investigations, notably in the killing of
Michael Brown last August in Ferguson.
In the case of Laquan McDonald, the Justice Department
carried out a sham “investigation” for more than a year while sitting on the
incontrovertible proof of police misconduct contained in the police dash-cam
video. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former Obama White House chief of staff, fought
for months against the video’s release on the grounds that it would disrupt
this “investigation.”
Meanwhile the White House worked behind the scenes to
coordinate the military-style crackdowns on protesters in Ferguson and
Baltimore, while Obama took to the mass media to denounce protesters as
“thugs.” The flow of military-grade hardware from the federal government to
local police departments, including assault rifles and armored vehicles, has
expanded considerably under Obama and has continued after the program sparked
popular outrage during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri last year.
The ongoing wave of police violence in the United
States and the defense of killer cops are the outcome of the continuous
strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state under conditions of
ever-growing inequality and continued mass poverty. Having no solutions to any
of the mounting social problems facing the country, the ruling elite turns ever
more to the defense of arbitrary state violence as the means to bolster its
continued domination over American society.
The original source of this article is World Socialist Website
Copyright © Tom Hall, World Socialist Website, 2015
Dr. Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business
Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide
following. Roberts' latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
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