Trump has ‘given green light’ to police to use lethal force: Analyst
The administration of US President Donald Trump has “given the green light” to police departments to continue using lethal force and violence against civilians, which has become “a national crisis,” an African American journalist in Detroit says.
“Two efforts on the part of the Trump administration is making the situation even worse,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor at the Pan-African News Wire.
The analyst was referring to two measures put in place by the US Justice Department that reverses restrictions on the transfer of some surplus military equipment to police departments, as well as rolling back a program to help reform police departments.
The recent changes rescind limits created by the administration of former President Barack Obama amid a national debate over police brutality touched off by a spate of high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of the police.
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who heads the Justice Department, has rolled back a number of Obama-era efforts toward police reform.
“These two measures send the wrong message to law enforcement,” Azikiwe said in a phone interview with Press TV on Friday.
“They’ve been given a green light to engage in this type of abusive behavior and consequently, the situation will not improve until people organize and change the system of law enforcement here in the United States,” he added.
US police killed 1,166 people in 2015, more than three a day, but an official US government count misclassified over half of the deaths, according to a new study.
More than half of all police killings in 2015 were incorrectly classified as not having been police-related, a Harvard study based on data by The Guardian has found.
The Guardian, a British daily newspaper and media company with US and international editions, counted 93 percent of the police-related deaths, while the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted only 45 percent.
“This study is just the tip of the iceberg,” Azikiwe said. “There so many unjustified homicides by law enforcement agencies across the United States; it is clearly a national crisis."
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