A United Nations panel visited six America cities and found that the U.S. is plagued by systemic racism and racial discrimination by law enforcement. They are a direct legacy of slavery and such racism dates to the founding of the country. They encourage the U.S. to focus on some soul searching that includes truth, justice, reparations, and non-repetition. We should have a truth and justice commission like they did in South Africa and other places.
With the long name of “International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement,” a group of international visitors whom I shall call “Mechanism” came to the United States from 24 April to 5 May 2023. They filed their report in September 2023. (A/HRC/54/CRP.7)
“Shocked, astounded, staggering, appalling”
The Mechanism often used words like “shocked, astounded, deeply concerned, staggering, appalling” when they saw the evidence of extreme racism in the U.S. They saw the racially biased treatment of immigrants and the violent abuse of protesters, legal observers, journalists, and paramedical teams.
They noted that legislatures followed up police violence by trying to make First Amendment protest illegal and to label protesters terrorists. At the time they visited, charges were still pending against the officers who murdered Manuel Teran at Stop Cop City in Georgia, while he was seated with his hands up. Since then, the prosecutor has declined to prosecute.
Because the U.S. is party to the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, it is subject to such visits to determine compliance with the international conventions. If the U.S. could be embarrassed, its white face would be beet red.
The Mechanism visited six cities: D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York. The request to visit Phoenix was denied. So much racism; so little time. During the visits, they met with federal and local authorities, judicial authorities, law enforcement, NOBLE, police unions, civil society organizations and others. They heard testimony from 133 affected individuals in five of the cities and received dozens of written submissions as well including from Phoenix.
They noted positively that Biden has issued five executive orders since he was elected to deal with racial equity, DEI in the workplace, policing, and diaspora. Still the international visitors observed that
Profound lack of trust
The Mechanism could not help but note the profound lack of trust of people of African descent toward law enforcement and the criminal “justice” system. They made it clear that current U.S. behaviors including Supreme Court rulings do not meet international standards. Our legal system was once the standard and the basis of many of the conventions and protocols now in existence in the world. Today we don’t live up to them ourselves. Eleanor Roosevelt, is one of the founders of the UN, would turn over in her grave.
Racial bias, stereotypes, and profiling play a large role in maintaining discrimination. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Blacks are three times more likely to experience the threat of force or use of nonfatal force; three times more likely to be shouted at by police; and 11 times more likely to experience police misconduct than white people. It’s not “bad apples.” It’s the social, historical, cultural, and structural system – it’s designed this way.
Technology, such as facial recognition, only exacerbates the harm to Blacks by extreme racial and sex disparities in error rates with 20-30% error for Black women compared to 0-0.8% for white men. Drones are misused to focus on surveilling Blacks and protesters. Yet when drones could be used to follow a fleeing felon, they don’t. They just shoot him instead.
The Mechanism were “alarmed” by how many people are killed by police in the U.S. – more than 1,000 a year with Blacks three times more likely to be killed then whites. A third or more of the victims were running away from police, thus posing no threat. Phoenix cops are the number one killers in the nation year after year after year.
The Mechanism pointed out that the killings are often connected to traffic stops, mental health crisis, or people not threatening anyone so there was no need to use deadly force. Designating police as the first responder to mental health calls is deadly.
The Mechanism bemoaned the inappropriate use of police in our schools where they set up the school-to-prison pipeline for students of color. Yet Tom Horne, AZ Dept of Education, is asking for uniformed and armed cops in every school. Children are arrested for dress code violations or taking too many cartons of milk. Perhaps they were hungry? Perhaps it was for a younger child at home? In Florida, police arrested elementary school students, as young as 5-years-old, 345 times in one year. That’s insanity.
“Shocked, staggering, appalling”
The Mechanism often used words like “shocked, astounded, deeply concerned, staggering, appalling” when they saw the evidence of extreme racism in the U.S. They saw the racially biased treatment of immigrants and the violent abuse of protesters, legal observers, journalists, and paramedical teams. They noted that legislatures followed up police violence by trying to make First Amendment protest illegal and to label protesters terrorists. At the time they visited, charges were still pending against the officers who murdered Manuel Teran at the Stop Cop City protest in January 2023, while he was seated with his hands up. Since then, the prosecutor has declined to prosecute.
Only 1.9% of police killings resulted in an officer being charged with a crime. In 2022, that was only 1%. It’s getting worse not better. The militarization of the police is of grave concern.
They also noted how the violent records of these police officers are hidden and how the abusers are recycled from department to department. Today, Departments wonder why they are having trouble recruiting decent officers. Who would want to work in a job where you must act immorally or your life will be threatened daily if you become a whistle blower?
Once again it was mentioned that the U.S. imprisons more people than any other country – seven million annually. We have surpassed Russia and China – we stand in a class of our own. I guess that makes us “exceptional?” Of course the incarceration falls most heavily on Blacks. One in 19 Black adults are under some kind of correctional supervision while it’s 1 in 62 white adults. The Mechanism considered this disproportionate rate “staggering.” But the U.S. Supreme Court says slavery was a long time ago, just get over it, and pretend we live in a color-blind society. How about we ask Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson how that’s working out for her?
The international investigation also looked at incarcerated women of which Black women are 34% and the extra abuse they receive if pregnant. The practice of shackling pregnant women and taking the baby immediately after birth contravenes international standards under the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandala Rules, Rule 48.2).
They were equally astounded at the treatment of children including those held in adult prisons. Black children are four times more likely than whites to be in prison. That doesn’t count the 32,000 who are now adults still in prison and may be there for life for offenses they committed while they were children. The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences children to prison for life without parole. Yet another example of our “exceptionalism.”
Cash bail keeps the innocent in jail
Equally shocking to the Mechanism was the half a million people detained daily who are innocent because they are pre-trial detainees. That percentage increased from 29% of those in jail in 2002 to 71% in 2023. Some people are held longer in pre-trial detention than they would be if convicted – and they are innocent. This of course brought up the issue of cash bail as the reason many remain in jail – or more properly called – debtors’ prison. The Tucson NAACP has embarked on its third year seeking this change in Arizona at the state legislature.
The Mechanism also remarked that pre-trial and convicted inmates are kept together in violation of the UN Standard Minimum Rules. They pointed out that immediate access to a lawyer and the prisoner’s family is crucial and often absent in the U.S. The death penalty is another area where international law requires us to abolish it; but we don’t. Solitary confinement is also prohibited but, in the U.S., we have held people in solitary confinement for decades – as many as 40 years. Three days is enough to bring on psychosis in many people. We simply cannot say we are ruled by any principles of international law or humane treatment of people when you look at what we actually do. Albert Woodfox was held over 43 years and 10 months in solitary because he was a Black Panther. His wrongful conviction was overturned in 2015 and he was released. He died August 4, 2022 at 75.
Jails and prisons have now become our mental health institutions as the investigation found. It caused them great alarm. They also considered the use of cheap or free labor provided by prisoners a violation of the 13th Amendment against slavery and were astonished at the plantation at Angola prison in Louisiana. They considered this the worst version of a racist criminal legal system. Recently all juveniles were removed from Angola. I suspect because the team was coming. But what were they doing there in the first place. Prisoners should have the same labor rights as everyone else according to international standards.
The practice of banning felons from voting in 48 states was also considered a violation of human rights. While Chicago has admitted and allegedly stopped their decades of torture by police officers, the officers were not charged. Criminalizing the homeless was another practice the Mechanism found abhorrent. Not only is it an ineffective way to deal with homelessness, but Blacks are highly overrepresented, and the actions have many downstream effects such as losing jobs, custody, children, and property leading to more homelessness.
Like countless others, the investigators found that the “war on drugs” now 50 years long is really a war on Blacks. Drug related offenses are the leading cause of arrest in the U.S. Despite comparable use of drugs between Blacks and whites, Blacks are arrested 3.6 times up to 10 times more. The “war on drugs” is simply a system of racial control.
A month before the September report, the same Independent Mechanism filed a report at the UN about their activities around the world not just the U.S. (A/HRC/54/69) In it, they said we must reimagine policing but the recommendations on how to do that were spare. Many of their suggestions were ones we have heard time and time again with no result. They suggested taking a human rights approach and one that would comply with international standards. But one must recall that many of those standards came from the U.S. in the first place and 1) we never lived up to them, and 2) our system has gone backward since 1980.
No ideas on how to increase trust in police
The Mechanism suggested a systemic approach to systemic racism – but first the people of the U.S. must understand that it is systemic racism and not “bad apples” or “one off.” The Central AZ National Lawyers Guild has a talk/PowerPoint on the history of police to educate people on that if desired. The Mechanism was insistent that trust between law enforcement and the Black community must be built but had no ideas on how.
The Mechanism suggested that first the U.S. must acknowledge the historic discrimination and its impact on policing today. The current political actions on banning CRT and teaching of accurate history goes in the opposite direction. Then there must be changes in police culture, DEI, community-oriented policing, and increased oversight and accountability.
Excuse me if we have heard all this before. They suggested demilitarization, de-escalation, diversity, and diversity training. We thought we had community-oriented policing, but it became clear that the protected community was the community of police officers. Residents of Phoenix have fought for over 40 years to get oversight and accountability of the Phoenix police to no avail. Nowhere in the suggestions is there any real reimagining of the police. The Defund Police movement of Black Lives Matter was perverted by the powers that be to look like having no police when in fact what BLM asked for was to divert funding for police into more appropriate areas like mental health counselors, homeless advocates, and school counselors who could respond to the issues without resort to a criminal justice system thus saving money and lives and building strong communities.
The Kerner Commission report in 1968 after the summer of uprisings had over 120 suggestions dealing with health, education, environment, community, and law enforcement. Had we followed those suggestions then, we would be in a very different and better place today. But we didn’t. Instead we did exactly what the Kerner Commission said would happen – we created two societies: one black, one white, very unequal, and harmful to us all.
Blacks have been doing this work for centuries and bearing the price. The scope is so overwhelming and depressing that sometimes I want to shut my eyes and ignore it or dream about moving. Since neither of those work, I must roll up sleeves and get to work.
But it is work that whites must do. Just like in the uprisings after George Floyd’s murder, whites need to stand in front of Blacks because the police are less likely to attack them. Blacks don’t need to read these statistics. They know it in their gut. From the “talk” they must give their children, to the worry every minute they are out of the house, to the stomach clenching fear every time a red light goes on behind them. It is a crime to ask the victims to fix the perpetrators; we must do it.
Let’s get to it:
- Vote the bigots out of office;
- Pass legislation to bring equity in education, employment, housing, medical care, and the justice system both criminal and civil;
- Support the work of your local African American group;
- Deal with your own bias yourself; don’t ask Black people to educate you;
- Support reparations – the value of 40 acres and a mule that was promised in 1865 and never delivered to those 40,000 freed slaves would be worth $640 billion today.
I think it is all disquieting and sad. Surely we know we are a racist, sexist, class-based society. Clearly we know we can change (just today I heard Gov Newsome(?) signed a law requiring children in California be taught cursive writing!)
We all seem to know and be able to recite the affirmations in the Declaration of Independence—-we can make it happen., and we will just as soon as we all see that all humans are human, and that none of us survives unless we all do. Community first, greed second. We can do it.
Why haven’t we? Doesn’t matter. We can and we must.
So a team of foreigners spend eleven days traveling to six cities spending about one day in each city and they are able to research multiple issues and draw conclusions based on that? That’s so ridiculous I am surprised even BfA reported it. Doesn’t any responsible journalist edit these posts?
Well, at least John Government Checks Kavanagh didn’t lead with “I have a black friend”….
But he did lead with this telling word run – “So a team of foreigners”.
He doesn’t question their bona-fides, or their data, he just says “foreigners” and dismisses the findings.
He’s actually proving their point, he’s just not bright enough to see it.
LOL. In fact, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
I’ve spent six and a half decades in this country, born in a small town in Ohio where I was literally sat down and told not to trust black people when I was five years old, to some time outside Boston, and wow, are those folks bold with the n-word.
Then California, the state with the largest numbers of Republicans, a group now being led by white supremacists, and finally here in Arizona, where John Government Checks Kavanagh is literally the post boy for racism.
Well, since his BFF J. T. Ready ended his own life, after killing a baby and the baby’s mother.
And bonus! Thanks to being a musician early on, I was out at night in clubs and bars, harassed by cops nonstop, and got to see racism in the jails and courts first hand.
John Kavanagh has nothing better to do than troll blogs, which is sad both because he’s an elected rep (and there just has to be something he should be working on) and a very old man with nothing better to do.
Again, sad.
America is great because when we get enough people aware of a problem, we fix it. We eventually live up to our ideals.
Old racist losers like Kavanagh are the problem. He can’t be fixed, we’ll need to work around him.
But good lord I wish he’d think things through instead of arguing against a study on racism by literally saying something racist.
SMH FFS.
RaicesTexasDotOrg
“…I was literally sat down and told not to trust black people when I was five years old.”
I think this is my earliest memory. My mother and I were in the Kress department store in downtown Jax FL. I walked toward the “colored only” water fountain to get a drink and my mother started screeching as though I were walking into a moving train. I couldn’t read. I still remember my confusion.
Anyhow, that’s one of the ways parents taught racism to the next generation.
My family is pretty much split on the issue to this day. My niece’s former husband, 35 yr old white man, didn’t want black folks in their house. He’ll teach that to his son and so on down the line.
I don’t see the light at the end of this tunnel. Never have, despite the hopefulness of the 60s and 70s.
Yep, the blacks are bad talk I got was from my dad’s dad, grandpa was using the janitor at the Parma Hotel in downtown Painesville Ohio as the example.
His son, my dad, to this day will say things like “if the Mexicans are taking all the jobs the blacks used to do, what are the blacks going to do”?
He’s too old for me to correct, but hey dad, those blacks are my peers and over time some have been my boss.
My dad, btw, just retired a few years ago, was the CFO at several corporation.
My younger brother is still a CFO, and his house was tagged a year or so ago with “Racist” and other accurate descriptions because they were flying a Blue Lives Matter flag.
And oh, yeah, he and his wife are racist AF.
Those are corporate executives. Not some hill folks in Alabama, California executives in 2023.
My mom’s husband, now retired, was a venture capitalist, meaning he had lots of money and looked for start-ups to fund.
Both he and my mother are bigots.
Don’t ask about my wife’s family. At least they’re not corporate executives making hiring and firing decisions, but holy smokes do they drop the n-word a lot.
God, I can still hear my dad mumbling “troublemaker” every time MLK was on the news.
But sure, let’s all ignore our lying eyes and pretend John Government Checks Kavanagh is an honest man.
You know that famous study from the 80’s, maybe 70’s, where they asked kids to identify the good dolls from the bad guy dolls, and even the little black kids picked the brown skinned dolls as the bad guys?
That’s what the media and people like John do to children, and it lasts with them their entire lives.
Just like a pedo scars children for life, so does racism, and I put racists like JGCK in the same category as pedo’s for that reason.
“Just like a pedo scars children for life, so does racism…”
That is God’s Truth. It’s like there are levels of victimhood from the most oppressed to the powerless observers, the children.
I have to give the Catholic nuns much respect in this regard. They taught us the right things, that we were all created equal and so forth. And I actually believe they were more influential than our parents and relatives. They had their ways of getting through.
I mostly have to ignore people like JGCK on matters of race. People get hardwired into their beliefs and they cannot be moved.
Well, at least for a change, you snuck in one substantive criticism of my post, even though it was wrong. But as usual, almost all of your comments were baseless, personal attacks.
Your observation was wrong. I did challenge the bona fides of the “mechanism” by pointing out that they were foreigners and only spent about a day in each city before concluding that the cities and America were racist.
Their being foreigners was not a racist comment. Although I suspect you meant xenophobic, which is a distaste for foreigners because if all the group members were German, it would not be racist on my part. Pointing out that they were foreigners was a legitimate point because it made them less likely to understand what they observed, just as only spending one day in each city hampered their fact-finding process.
PS I had more bills signed into law last session than any other member and more bills vetoed by the governor, so I am working on legislation. Another baseless criticism from you.
Xenophobia – “a desire to eliminate the presence of the group which is the target of suspicion, and fear of losing a national, ethnic, or racial identity”
So, nope, you’re still racist.
You have not presented any contrasting facts to support your claim.
You literally just said “foreigners” and called it a day.
You’re supposed to be more subtle with the dog whistles, Government Checks.
What specifically is in the report that you dispute?
You have read it, right? I mean, you’re an elected official, you don’t have knee jerk reactions…
On a positive note, gosh! You submitted the most bills!
By now all of Arizona’s problems must be solved!
Hooray!
Oops, nope, wait, seems the record shows many, many of your bills are actually cheap stunts to be used in campaigns and for fundraising, wasting taxpayer money and government time.
I don’t know, John, it’s not looking good for you right now.
Try again. And remember, the dictionary is your friend.
RaicesTexas DotOrg
Would you think that they are credible if they were Russians expressing support for election lies or corporatists expressing support for the school voucher scam?
Funny about the UN body that is conducting this study. It is the UN Human Rights Council. Human Rights Watch wrote this about them in 2019:
For the next three years, those sitting on the United Nations Human Rights Council will include the likes of the Philippines, where thousands have been killed in the name of President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs”; Eritrea, found by a UN inquiry to have committed crimes against humanity; Cameroon, where government security forces have committed extrajudicial executions, burned property, carried out arbitrary arrests and tortured detainees while combatting a separatist insurgency; and Bahrain, which routinely retaliates against rights activists who raise concerns about government abuses. These states will join persistent rights violators China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia on the council.
So to answer the question, I would never think this crew credible. Would you Craig?
Isn’t it kind of telling that this bunch is credible on this particular topic?
Kind of Liz Cheney talking about Cheeto’s lack of human decency. She’s a Cheney. Not exactly a glowing character reference.
Sometimes, certain folks suffer from broken clock syndrome. Doesn’t mean that they’re right about everything, but on a given topic, they may be right.
John Government Checks Kavanagh is still shooting at the messenger and not even attempting to refute the contents of the report.
He couldn’t even get through the first few words of his first comment without saying something racist.
You know how in scary movies there’s almost always a jump scare scene where someone is fumbling around a haunted house, comes into a room, sees someone in the dark and let’s out a yelp, only to find it’s themselves in the mirror?
When JGCK saw the report he yelped.
Not surprising considering cops and cop-wannabes who milk the Port Authority for 20 years eating donuts and ticketing cars at the bus station learn all their redneck, racist, uncouth, MAGA habits by protecting white privilege at the expense of Blacks and other marginalized classes. In addition to the ingrained racism in America, it’s difficult to change cop culture when American cops generally don’t need much more than a HS or GED to be hired. Remember the knuckle-dragging neanderthals in high schools? They’re the ones who became cops.
https://www.mysite-myopinions.com/2023/05/30/police-incompetence/
Very disturbing (but likely true) report of these American cities. Many black men are targeted by local police officers and harmed in America. Once my husband and I were livng in Bristol, England. A young black college student asked about her brother who was thinking of coming to live in America. We discouraged her and told her it was not safe for Black men. Thanks for publishing this UN report.
Well written! Our group at Phoenix Peace Builders is sharing this and working on a monthly series of workshops to educate and take positive action. Its working title is Racism and Allyship. We are due to launch Racism and Allyship in Jan or Feb 2024. Thanks so much for this blog! We will add it to our reading list. Peace and good.