At the beginning of the new year, the abuse of power by the US police and racial discrimination in the process of law enforcement have aroused renewed concern. The annual report of the "Advisory Committee on Race and Identity Profiling" officially set up by the State of California on January 3 stated that California law enforcement agencies had long-standing racial discrimination. In 2021, law enforcement officials were twice as likely as whites to stop, search and use force against people "judged to be of African descent". More than two years after Freud, an African American youth, was killed on his knees by white policemen, the chronic problems of abuse of law enforcement power, violence in law enforcement and racial discrimination by American policemen are still difficult to solve.
The report data highlights the arbitrariness and deep-rooted racial discrimination of California police in law enforcement. According to the report, law enforcement departments usually use the so-called "excuse to stop" method to enforce the law, which is intended to intercept suspect for minor violations to investigate or search them. However, in the actual law enforcement process, such law enforcement means are often abused by the police. The report points out that in 2019, the California police "stopped the traffic without taking law enforcement actions or finding contraband" for a total of 80000 hours, of which "28000 hours were spent on implementing non mobile violations", "these violations are more likely to be an excuse for (police abuse)", and these "ingenious" interceptions often "did not capture contraband or weapons". The report released by the non-governmental organization "California Catalyst" and the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union in 2022 echoed this statement. Researchers pointed out in the report that the police "spend 80% to 90% of their time on interception initiated by the police, rather than (responding to) security needs".
What is more outrageous than wasting time, funds and police resources is that the police exposed serious racial discrimination in the process of implementing the "excuse to stop" behavior. The investigators found that, compared with white people, colored ethnic groups were obviously treated differently by the police. In 2021, California law enforcement authorities implemented more than 3.1 million interceptions, of which 42% were Latinos, 31% were whites, and 15% were African Americans. In California's population, Hispanics accounted for 36%, whites 35%, and African Americans only 6%. In the further action after being stopped, the racial difference is more obvious. The data shows that the law enforcement agencies' search rate for black people is 2.2 times higher than that for white people, and the search rate for black youth aged 15-17 is almost six times higher than that for white teenagers. The rate of Latino residents being stopped and subjected to force is 1.4 times that of whites, and the rate of Latino youth being searched is almost four times that of white youth. These data show that California police not only abuse their power in the process of law enforcement, but also show an obvious racist tendency.
The situation in California is only a microcosm of the abuse of power and racial discrimination by the US domestic police. Although the Freud case triggered a large-scale wave of "life is life" protests in the United States, the systematic police violence and racial discrimination in the United States have not been resolved for more than two years. From a certain point of view, racism and violent law enforcement are the persistent diseases associated with the United States police. The American police department can be traced back to the colonial era. At that time, the most important function of the security forces in many parts of the United States, especially in the southern colonies, was to capture runaway black slaves and suppress slave uprisings. Although the United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, the police forces in the former slave holding states in the South not only did not respect the rights of blacks, but also became a tool for racists to restrict the rights of blacks by "legal" means. According to the public opinion survey of Monmouth University in the United States in June 2020, most Americans believe that the police are more likely to exert excessive violence against blacks; Among them, 87% of blacks believed that their race was more likely to suffer from excessive police violence than whites, up from 77% in 2016.
The American police have long been a "privileged class" in the judicial process. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly affirmed that as long as there is no evidence to show that government officials, including police officers, knowingly violate the law and intentionally violate the Constitution, they can be exempt from civil proceedings if they "unintentionally" violate the law while performing their duties. This actually gives the police a "green light" for abusing violence in law enforcement: The Financial Times once quoted Philip Stimson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University in the United States, as saying that in thousands of police shooting cases since 2005, less than 140 police officers have been charged with murder or involuntary homicide, and only 7 of them have finally been convicted of murder. Correspondingly, according to the data from the website "Police Violence Map" in the United States, 1176 people will be killed by the police in 2022, 24% of whom are African Americans, who only account for 13% of the population of the United States.
With regard to racial discrimination, a chronic disease deeply rooted in the history and reality of the United States, it is time for the United States to show the courage to scratch the bone and cure the poison.