The UN high commissioner for human rights is probing “systemic racism, [and] violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of African descent by law enforcement agencies,” Marjorie Cohn reports.
This is the 8th story in our series looking back on a quarter century of reporting by Consortium News.
The unprovoked murder of two New York policemen has prompted understandable outrage, but the larger context remains the U.S. failure to address legacies of slavery and segregation, compounded by recent police violence targeting young black men, as Dustin Axe explains.
Many white Americans think that racism is a problem of the past and that troubling realities like mass incarceration and murder rates for black and brown men as well as inferior government services in racially diverse communities have other explanations. But recent events…
The police officer who killed Michael Brown convinced a St. Louis grand jury not to indict by likening the unarmed 18-year-old black man to “a demon” who looked “mad that I’m shooting at him” language reminiscent of an earlier era when…
There is an old saying that prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich and statistics bear that out. But the police slaying of a young African-American man in Missouri received startlingly different treatment with the grand jury…
From the “war on drugs” to the “war on terror,” U.S. society has grown increasingly militarized with police now armed to the teeth with weapons of war to deploy against American citizens, a process that apes U.S. violence-oriented actions abroad,…
Though often disparaged by the mainstream media, the Internet and its social media represent an important safeguard against civil rights abuses, like the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, from being covered up. That makes Net neutrality especially important, says Michael…