US government must demilitarize police officers: Journalist
The US government must take measures to demilitarize police departments across the country and outlaw the use of lethal force by officers to bring down the level of police violence against civilians, an African American journalist in Detroit says.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Monday condemned police in the state of California for excessive use of force and the high number of deaths involving officers, particularly among ethnic minorities.
“This report by the American Civil Liberties Union is quite significant,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor at the Pan-African News Wire.
The police violence against blacks in the cities of Anaheim and Bakersfield is “indicative of the United States as a whole,” Azikiwe said in a phone interview with Press TV on Tuesday.
The ACLU said in a report that the level of lethal violence directed at Latinos and blacks in the cities of Anaheim and Bakersfield is out of proportion with the level of crime.
“The roots of crime in the United States deal with poverty, the lack of health care, the broken public education system,” Azikiwe said.
The ACLU published a report earlier this month denouncing "a disturbing pattern of shootings, beatings and canine attacks" by police and sheriff's deputies, especially targeting unarmed suspects, in Bakersfield and across Kern County in California.
The ACLU's director of police practices for California, Peter Bibring, warned of a "nationwide problem" with the use of excessive force which was particularly acute in the America’s most populous state in part because of a culture of secrecy surrounding investigations of officer misconduct.
Numerous demonstrations have been held across the US in recent years following white police officers killing unarmed African-American men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.
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