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YOU know you have a problem when North Korea criticises your human rights record. In the wake of the Ferguson riots in the US, it called America a country which is “wantonly violating” human rights.
The Russians got a few kicks in as well, saying “It’s about time the US authorities paid attention to this rather than focusing on lecturing the rest of the world on human rights.” The Chinese were a little more circumspect, calling it an “internal affair” but adding that there’s “no such thing as perfection when it comes to human rights regardless of whatever country you’re in”. You could smell the schadenfreude.
This criticism is of course meant to chide the US which is so in the habit of expressing ‘concern’ at similar situations worldwide. Such motivations aside, the shooting of Michael Brown in August, the riots that followed and the response that ensued, coupled with the current situation arising out of the grand jury decision do point to some serious institutional fault lines in the US.
US justice seems geared towards protecting officers.
On that decision, the main evidence provided to the jury seems to be the testimony of officer Wilson, in which he narrates (without cross-questioning) the events that led to the shooting of 18-year-old Brown.
According to data from the Bureau of Justice, in over 162,500 cases prosecuted by district attorneys from 2009 to 2010, federal grand juries (this particular jury was on the state level) returned indictments in all but 11 of them. But then there is also the fact that such juries are reluctant to indict police officers.
Recently a state grand jury did not indict police officers who threw a flash grenade into a playpen during a house raid, critically burning a toddler even though it was clear that there were serious gaps in the police process and that the actual suspect wasn't even in the house at the time.
More recently, a 22-year-old black man was shot dead in a Walmart as he talked on the phone while holding a BB gun that he had picked up from the shelf with the apparent intention of buying. No indictment was returned there either. Then there’s 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot dead by cops for holding a toy gun outside a playground; the jury’s still out here.
In the Wilson case, the motivations of prosecuting attorney Robert McCullough can also be called into question, as the determination of the PA to get an indictment is crucial. McCullough’s father was a policeman who was shot dead by a black assailant when the to-be attorney was only 12 and it is entirely possible that this tragic event shaped his worldview. Notably, he also spent a good 10 minutes of his ‘no indictment’ press conference blaming media and social media for Ferguson’s troubles.
But individuals and individual cases aside, there seems to be a serious institutional problem as well. Because while the American justice system seems geared towards keeping officers out of trouble it is also very much geared towards imprisoning black people.
Here are some more stats to back up that latter assertion. According to publicly accessible and cross-referenced data tabulated by the Centre for American Progress, while black Americans make up only 30pc of the population, they constitute 60pc of the prison population. Look at it another way and it means that one in 15 black Americans are currently in jail and that a staggering one in three black men can reasonably expect to go to jail in their lifetimes.
This makes sense when you also consider that, according to the Department of Justice, black Americans are approximately three times more likely to be searched during a routine traffic stop. Of course, black Americans tend to get stopped more often as well.
When they get their day in court, according to an advocacy group called the Sentencing Project, they are 20pc more likely to get sentenced and when sentenced, tend to get longer jail terms than other groups. In keeping with this, while rates of incarceration for women are generally low in the US, black women are three times likelier to end up in jail than their white or Hispanic counterparts. How many of these are wrongful convictions is hard to tell, but consider that 63pc of convicts exonerated after DNA testing are black Americans.
One side effect is electoral disenfranchisement. Given that under US law those convicted of felonies are ineligible to vote, this means that 10pc of black Americans are effectively unable to vote.
Following Barack Obama’s election, many in the US thought they had finally seen the birth of a post-racial society but this, like Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, seems to have been a remarkably naïve prediction. Much of the criticism of Obama has in fact moved racist views to the mainstream, and reactions to Ferguson have shown just how black and white the divide is.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
Published in Dawn, December 1st, 2014
