Most blacks in US experience police brutality: Poll

Two-thirds of young blacks and about half of Latinos in the US say that they or someone they know has experienced police violence or harassment, according to a new poll.

The GenForward poll found that 66 percent of African Americans aged 18-30 and 4 in 10 Hispanics said they had personally experienced violence or harassment at the hands of the police.

The GenForward poll of young adults is a survey by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Over 90 percent of young black adults believe police killings of African Americans is an extremely serious problem, compared with 76 percent of Hispanics, 67 percent of Asian Americans, and just 48 percent of white young adults.

Those survey results come amid renewed anger over the fatal shooting of several young African American men by police around the country.

On July 5, Alton Sterling was fatally shot during a struggle with officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile was killed the following day by an officer in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Their deaths triggered revenge attacks against police by two black US military veterans. Five officers were shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, on July 7 and three were ambushed and fatally shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 17.

Over 55,000 people in the United States were either killed or wounded by police in just one year, according to a recent study.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed British medical journal Injury Prevention, found that most of the deaths were from fatal firearm wounds or excessive use of taser devices.

Some 1,063 people were either fatally shot or tasered to death by police in 2012, out of an estimated 12.3 million stops and arrests, the study noted.