American Racial Disequilibrium

"If we point to the officer and say, 'You did something wrong', we all feel a lot better, and it's concrete. But when the problem is the system -- you have racism without racists. ... It doesn't seem as harmful, and [is] so abstract that we have a hard time figuring out how to fix it."
Marcia McCormick, criminal law professor, St.Louis University

"The narrative that cops are out gunning for unarmed black people is just not supported by the data. Cops tend to shoot a lot of white people too, it just tends not to make the news."
Peter Moskos, professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, former Baltimore policeman

"It raises the question of whether there is not a culture in some parts of the country of, 'We can do anything we want and get away with it'."
"I worry that at least some of the many police forces in the country work in a culture like that."
Eugene O'Donnell, criminologist, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

There is a heritage of systemic racism in the United States. Which made it all the more surprising and gratifying -- both to Americans who consider themselves open-minded, subscribing to the notion of equality of all citizens, and to the world at large -- that the United States finally made the grade to electing a black candidate for President whose credentials and promises appeared to satisfy the hope for societal renewal.

Even he, formerly a community organize for the black community in Chicago, however, was not able to convince black Americans that their equal rights under the law could guarantee them the security they deserved. And nor could he possibly change generations of habit resulting in the black community breeding social misfits and a broad criminal class resistant to law and order. So much so that the community is over-represented in prisons because of their penchant for criminal acts.

That very ubiquity of young black males resentful of the circuitous issues of crime breeding suspicion, adding their own spurning of the social contract of lawful behaviour to the iniquitous presence within society of a racist streak, creates a stark division of tensions between black and white. A divided society where each exudes suspicion of the other, and where police almost instinctively consider young black males to equal trouble.

There is no agreement between experts in the field of criminology whether white police disproportionately use their guns to kill black men, despite the impression left in broader society that this is indeed the case. The systemic problems in the general society appear amplified, however, in the stand-off between police and the black population. That, apart from the very real presence of psychopaths among the police.

AP  In this frame from video provided by the attorney representing the family of Walter Lamer Scott, Scott appears to be running away from City Patrolman Michael Thomas Slager, right, in North Charleston, S.C. Slager was charged with murder. 

The April 4 murder of 52-year-old Walter Scott as he attempted to escape from the presence of patrolman Michael Slager fearing that their encounter, when he was pulled over because one of his car taillights was broken has shocked the country anew. Mr. Scott was a member of the Coast Guard, he was an ordinary American with ordinary personal problems, among which was his failure to keep up-to-date on child support payments. Perhaps that alone was enough to have him decide to run.

On the other hand, perhaps it was the recent memory of the death of Eric Garner who suffocated as police attempted to arrest  him for illegally selling cigarettes on Staten Island. Whatever his emotions and his reasoning at the time, he was doomed, when fate placed Michael Slager in the picture, a man whose penchant for violent confrontation hadn't been limited to this fateful encounter, and who has been charged with murder for deliberately shooting an unarmed man in the back, no fewer than eight times.

Blacks make up around 13 percent of the American population. The U.S. Justice Department's statistics on arrest-related deaths report that 1,215 white Americans and 932 black Americans met their death at the hands of police holding weapons, from 2003 to 2009. Which means that African Americans were four times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts. On the other hand, blacks are five times likelier to kill police officers; and policing in the U.S. focuses largely on black street crime,

Peter Moskos, professor at John Jay College worries about the real issues being overlooked, including the aggressive police enforcement of relatively minor offences like traffic violations and the failure to make support payments, the very issue that may have persuaded Walter Scott to run from his killer. Add to that policies governing the police use of force. And the issue of the mentality prevailing in firearms training.

The mentality exhibited by Constable Slager of casual brutality including his attempted framing of the event as self-defence, fires the indignation of all Americans that an atrocity of that nature could take place. Shifting attention away from details that concern Peter Moskos, and validating the fearful concerns of the black community.