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Human rights in US a catastrophic failure: American researcher

Wednesday, 23 December 2015 9:17 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 23 December 2015 12:13 PM ]

“The numbers of [black] people that have been killed by the police have risen exponentially since Present Barack Obama has been in office,” said Dr. Randy Short.

The rising death of African Americans by the hands of white police officers highlights the “catastrophic failure of human rights in the United States,” a researcher and historian in Washington says.

“The numbers of [black] people that have been killed by the police have risen exponentially since Present Barack Obama has been in office,” said Dr. Randy Short, who has a Ph.D in African studies.

The majority of black politicians in Washington are not concerned about the oppression carried out by the white majority against African Americans, Dr. Short said in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

“We have over 40 blacks in Congress, most of them Democrats, and they do nothing, they are useless,” he said.

Blacks live in a “racist, unfair, genocidal, capitalistic system” that must be addressed by the international community, Dr. Short reiterated.

A Waller County grand jury in Texas has decided that neither sheriff's officials nor jailers committed a crime in the treatment of Sandra Bland who died in a Texas county jail last summer.

Prosecutor Darrell Jordan said Monday that the jury has not yet determined whether the white state trooper who arrested the black female should face charges.

Bland was found hanged in a prison cell at the Waller County jail in Texas on July 13 three days after she was arrested for failing to use her signal lights while changing lanes.

A police dashboard video shows how a routine traffic stop by Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia escalated into a verbal and physical confrontation between him and the 28-year-old Bland.

Police in the United States have killed about 1,150 people as of December 15 of this year, with the largest police departments disproportionately killing at least 321 African Americans, according to data compiled by an activist group.

Forty percent of people killed by police in the country's 60 biggest police departments were black, while the African-American population in those jurisdictions was 20 percent, according to activists that run he Mapping Police Violence project.

Police killings, especially of African Americans, have sparked protests in cities across the US over the past two years.

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