US police ‘killing and oppressing’ blacks
Police in the United States lack empathy and have a long history of “killing and oppressing” Africans-Americans, an international lawyer in Atlanta says.
“No matter how well we train the police on human rights standards, what is lacking in the police department in the United States is empathy,” said Mustafa Ansari, who is also a black human rights activist.
US police apply the same violent tactics that the American military uses in warzones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Ansari told Press TV on Wednesday.
Such brutal tactics are similar to the ones employed by Israeli police against Palestinians, he noted.
The deaths of several black men in recent months by white police officers who were not indicted have sparked a series of nationwide protests against police brutality.
On Saturday, those tensions escalated after a black gunman ambushed and shot dead two New York City policemen in retaliation for the recent killings.
On Tuesday, another African-American teenager was shot dead by a police officer in Saint Louis, Missouri.
The victim, 18-year-old Antonio Martin, was unarmed when officers fatally shot him at a gas station in Berkeley, witnesses said.
Based on a study by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 313 African-Americans were killed in 2012 by police officers, private security guards and members of the public, and in most cases the perpetrator was not indicted.
Research conducted by social psychologists from Stanford and Yale universities shows there is an implicit racial bias in the American mindset that relates black men with crime.
