UN inquiry into U.S. police brutality (op-ed)

 

Recently, 200 families representing loved ones that were victimized by American police forces during the past two decades have teamed up with 300 civil liberties organizations and filed a request with the United Nations asking for the Human Rights Council to launch an inquiry into police violence in the United States. 

No serious person in the United States would disagree that police brutality is a problem, and all measures should be taken to reduce it.  So, it’s hard to criticize a call for a UN probe. 

However, here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of this international crusade. 

The Good

Since 2014 a narrative was repeated by journalists, scholars, and activists that white police officers were targeting minorities for extrajudicial killings.  Many accepted the narrative due to America’s racist past, but others wanted to know if the race-based narrative corresponded with reality.

After the Washington Post created its Police Shooting Database and the academic findings of black economist Roland Fryer were published, the public had evidence that revealed the race-based narrative didn’t match the data.  The Washington Post database pointed out that American police forces shoot and kill close to 1,000 people per year, but the majority of those killed were armed and were not minorities.  The Fryer Study concluded that minorities were more likely than whites to experience uses of force by police officers but minorities were not more likely to be shot by police than whites.

After previous demonstrations against police shootings, black activists thanked a group they referred to as “white allies” for their support.  These “white allies” were individuals that attended demonstrations and donated money to bail out protesters.

The whites within the 200 families appealing to the United Nations are a plus because they model what a “white ally” actually is in a movement against police brutality.

The Bad

In the 1960s, there was a saying, “The issue is never the issue.  The issue is always the revolution.” 

Last year, following George Floyd’s death, over 50 African countries demanded that the United Nations launch a high-level investigation into systemic racism and police brutality in the United States.  The UN Human Rights Council agreed to “recommend an agenda for transformative change to dismantle systemic racism and police brutality against Africans and people of African descent, and to advance accountability and redress for victims”.

Notice systemic racism was mentioned first, not police brutality. 

The efforts of 200 families and 300 organizations from the United States will be a part of this agenda. The director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program told the press, “Police violence is not a uniquely American problem, but the impunity and disproportionate killing of black, brown, indigenous people at the hands of law enforcement are, and it requires the entire international community to act.”

On an international level police brutality should be its own issue, but the director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program basically said: The issue is never the issue.  The issue is always systemic racism.

The Ugly

The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the UN Human Rights Council, citing corruption, but the Biden administration seeks to rejoin the Human Rights Council to restore U.S. leadership.  Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “The Human Rights Council is a flawed body, in need of reform” but Trump’s withdrawal, “created a vacuum of U.S. leadership.”

The director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program once again told the press, “If the Biden administration is serious about addressing police violence and its pledge to lead by the power of example, it should welcome international scrutiny.”

Here’s the problem, even scrutiny needs a legitimate source to be valid.

In 2016 a travel site listed 17 countries that had the worse police brutality within their borders.  The United States was number 17 and most of the countries ahead of the United States hold seats on the UN Human Rights Council.  These countries are in Africa, Europe, and Asia, and they don’t have disproportional police shootings by race because they’re not multi-racial societies.

So, by combining systemic racism and police brutality, the United States becomes the world leader instead of the countries that actually lead the world in police brutality.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 5/19/21