US must address racial prejudice issue

Recent incidents such as in Baltimore, Maryland, are the tip of the iceberg. How did we reach this nadir, and what can be done?

Even though we have a black president in the White House, Dr Martin Luther King’s dream still eludes us. There is just too much racism in the US. This leads to an us-versus-them mentality.

Rather than being “a melting pot”, we are a stew of separate and often unequal groupings. This is reflected in how they view police.

While 83 per cent of whites have confidence that police will do a good job of law enforcement, only 63 per cent of Hispanics and 52 per cent of blacks feel that way. And even more tellingly, 74 per cent of whites have confidence in the police to not use excessive force on suspects, 45 per cent of Hispanics and a mere 36 per cent of blacks feel that way.

Just getting the various groups communicating will help open lines of communication and break the great divide. President Barack Obama’s Interim Task Force for 21st Century Policing report issued in March is replete with examples of community collaborations that work. Police athletic leagues and engagement with teens are time-tested winners. Everyone in China has a name card, right? The task force recommends that each cop have one too.

While I consider myself moderate-to-liberal, I am sympathetic to the police. The US is awash with guns, more than one for each man, woman and child. Indeed, 80 per cent of the people shot by police had a weapon, usually a firearm, and nearly 25 percent were mentally challenged. But I believe that in this age of high technology, the use of primitive weaponry can often be replaced or augmented by newer less lethal weapons well beyond TASERS and stun-guns such as conductive energy devices (or CEDs) which have been shown both to decrease the number of fatal police interventions and reduce injuries.

Another simple new technology solution is the use of body worn cameras shown to drastically reduce the incidents of use of force, and significantly lower the number of citizen complaints. Social media, too, can play their part. The police and communities they serve can be bridged by two-way interactive sites that both inform and create dialogue.

Among the biggest complaints of American citizens in predominantly black Ferguson with a predominantly white police force was aggressive traffic law enforcement and court fines to generate income. And people who don’t pay go to the slammer. In 2013, Ferguson had an astounding 33,000 outstanding arrest warrants, absurd given its population of only 21,000! This festering issue clearly needs to be addressed.

Interestingly, we don’t even officially know the number of police-related civilian deaths. In this Big Data era, we only know from Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics that there have been about 400 “justifiable police homicides” annually. Yet the website, killedbypolice.net, which tracks news reports, lists 1,104 deaths caused by police for last year. Having good data to analyse, including public opinion data, can only make for better studies forming the basis for sound policy decisions.

Like China, the US is a great country always seeking to better itself. Justice, equality and fairness should be part of the American dream that will surely be realised.

 

The author is a senior adviser to Tsinghua University and former director and vice-director of ABC Television in New York.