‘US criminal justice system broken’: Journalist

The criminal justice system is “broken” in the United States, where people are far more likely to be killed by police than by the ISIL terrorist group or the Ebola virus, an investigative journalist in New York says.

Police officers across the US kill between 500 and 1,000 people annually, whereas only 2 or 3 Americans have been killed by ISIL terrorists or Ebola during the past year, George Mapp Jr. told Press TV on Sunday.

“If police officers are killing innocent black people and even white people, killing people innocently without any due process or any penalties, then the system is broken,” Mapp said.

“The fact is that they’re not being punished, there seems to be no deterrence, so therefore police commissioners need to be held accountable, the mayors of the cities need to be held accountable,” he stated.

On Saturday, demonstrations continued across the US for a fourth straight night to denounce brutal police tactics amid a spate of killings of unarmed black men in recent months by white police officers who were not charged with murder.

Thousands of people from California to New York and elsewhere held rallies to protest a grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner in July as well as similar killings in recent months.

The outrage echoes the reaction of protesters after a St. Louis grand jury decided on November 24 not to indict a white police officer in the August shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

US police shoot and kill an average of 1,000 people a year, 1 in 4 of whom unarmed, according to a report by the Police Policy Studies Council.