Police brutality rooted in US racist nature: Pundit

Anti-black crimes by US officers are happening across police departments, because America is fundamentally still a racist country, a Washington-based columnist and political scientist has said.

Speaking on Press TV’s ‘The Debate’ program on Thursday night, Wilmer Leon touched on Department of Justice’s report about the routine abuse of Baltimore citizens by police forces, saying it speaks to the US history of ‘repression’.

“The history of the United States is replete with examples of how police departments have been used for generations as occupying forces and as forces of repression,” he said.

The new report, Leon said, indicates that officers make frequent stops, mostly in poor, black neighborhoods, with insufficient justification and unlawfully arrest citizens.

“Investigators found supervisors have issued explicitly discriminatory orders such as arresting all black people wearing hoodies,” he said.

“The fundamental problem with police departments in the United States is they are operating from a racist, systemic mindset that has very little to do with individual officers as good cops and, bad cops,” he added.

Jim Walsh, a research associate at MIT from Boston, said the report is “sad news but it is not a surprise,” even as the data collected relied on police departments’ self-reporting to the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI).

He said there is quite a large disparity in the ratio of being killed by the US police “if you are unarmed and white versus unarmed and a member of minority group.”