Alwaght- Two more African Americans have been shot and killed by racist white police officers in the United States triggering protests across the country.
In the latest incident, a white United States police officer shot and killed an African American man in Minneapolis on Thursday with the aftermath of the gruesome incident being streamed live on the internet.
The death of the man identified by family as Philando Castile, 32, came hours after the U.S. Justice Department said it had opened an investigation into Tuesday's fatal shooting of a black man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by two police officers.
Live streaming of shooting
A statement from the St. Anthony Police Department said only that an unidentified black man was wounded during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, at 9 p.m. local time. He was taken to a hospital, where he later died.
A woman streamed a 10-minute video on Facebook and posted it on YouTube shortly after the shooting.
The video began with the woman in the passenger seat describing what had happened moments before while a black man covered in blood sat in the driver's seat as a police officer pointed a gun into the vehicle.
The woman said her boyfriend had just been pulled over for a broken tail light and explained that he had a gun he was licensed to carry.
"He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out of his pocket," she said. "He let the officer know that he had a firearm and that he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm."
Meanwhile on Wednesday, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana another African American indentified as Alton Sterling, 37, was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police officers.
An investigation into the shooting Wednesday afternoon after video appeared to contradict official police accounts that Sterling was holding a gun.
US Black police officer outraged
A black police officer from Ohio has delivered a powerful personal response to the shooting of Sterling in Louisiana.
Nakia Jones, who became a police officer in 1996, said she had watched the graphic mobile phone video of 37-year-old Mr Sterling’s shooting “over and over”. She told her colleague that, “There’s many of us who would give our life for anybody, and we took this oath and we meant it. If you are an officer who is prejudiced, take the uniform off and put the KKK hoodie on.”
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or simply "the Klan", is the name of three distinct past and present movements in the United States that have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-immigration.’
“If you are white, and you work [as a police officer] in a black community, and you are racist, you need to be ashamed of yourself,” she said.
Grim statistics of police terror
The two Blacks are the latest victims of police terror in the US and a harsh reminder of life-threatening reality faced by Black communities in the country that claims to be a global champion of human rights. These killings are part of a long legacy of racism in the US and expose the continued persecution of Black and Brown people.
Some 525 people have been fatally shot by police in the US so far in 2016, according to The Guardian's interactive database catalog, "The Counted".
The report notes that young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.
At least 123 black Americans have been shot and killed by police so far in 2016.
US police killed over 1,150 people in 2015, with the largest police departments disproportionately killing at least 321 African Americans, according to data compiled by an activist group that runs the Mapping Police Violence project.
Despite making up only 13 percent of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.
For a country in which a lot of black people are killed by police, it is very difficult to get precise data on numbers or patterns. The statistics that are available paint a grim enough picture, but are considerably lower than actual incidents.
UN Expressed concern over dismal state of US Blacks
Early this year, the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent issued a report noting that the dangerous ideology of white supremacy inhibits social cohesion amongst the US population. The UN body noted that contemporary killings of Blacks by US police and the trauma it creates are reminiscent of the racial terror lynching of the past. Impunity for state violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency, the report added.
The UN panel pointed out that racial bias and disparities in the US criminal justice system, mass incarceration, and the tough on crime policies has disproportionately impacted African Americans. The UN body also expressed concern over mandatory minimum sentencing and disproportionate punishment of African Americans including the death penalty.
