Jamaica, Before You Demonize Your Cops, Here Are Some Sobering Perspectives…

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These cops lit­er­al­ly act­ed improp­er­ly, then con­fis­cat­ed a cit­i­zen’s cell phone, bul­lied him, then real­iz­ing that he had done noth­ing wrong, they open­ly con­spired how to, then framed him for some­thing he nev­er did.

According to the news site Vox​.com. Police offi­cers in the US shoot and kill hun­dreds of peo­ple each year, accord­ing to the FBI’s very lim­it­ed data — far more than oth­er devel­oped coun­tries like the UK, Japan, and Germany, where police offi­cers might go an entire year with­out killing more than a dozen peo­ple or even any­one at all. 

This is crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant because the US rate of gun deaths, which includes homi­cides and sui­cides, was 10.6 per 100,000 peo­ple in 2016. As opposed to a devel­op­ing coun­try like Jamaica whose vio­lent mur­der is 47 per 100,000 per annum.
That dwarfed com­pa­ra­ble devel­oped nations: Switzerland’s rate was 2.8, Canada’s was 2.1, Australia’s was 1, Germany’s was 0.9, the United Kingdom’s was 0.3, and Japan’s was 0.2.

In a 2014 Article for the nation, after the Ferguson inci­dent in which unarmed black teen Michael Brown was gunned down, Journalist, Chase Madar point­ed out that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment does not keep a strict nation­al tal­ly of police killings.
Madar argued that this shows just how seri­ous­ly the Government takes this prob­lem. A crowd­sourced data­base has sprung up to fill the gap, as has a wiki-tab­u­la­tion.
Perhaps the most dis­turb­ing thing about these police killings, many of them of unarmed vic­tims, Madar argues, is that our courts find them per­fect­ly legal.
In a bril­liant sum­ma­tion of police vio­lence in America Madar argued quote:” The first step to con­trol­ling the police is to get rid of the fan­ta­sy, once and for all, that the law is on our side. The law is firm­ly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civil­ians.”
See arti­cle here: https://​www​.then​ation​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​w​h​y​-​i​t​s​-​i​m​p​o​s​s​i​b​l​e​-​i​n​d​i​c​t​-​c​op/

Despite the wide litany of cas­es in which American Police lit­er­al­ly mur­der unarmed cit­i­zens, Chase Mader warns,Quote: ” (A note on the IACHR and oth­er inter­na­tion­al forums: bring­ing these cas­es of police shoot­ings to them is a can­ny way to gen­er­ate pub­lic­i­ty and raise con­scious­ness, but no one should ever imag­ine for even a sec­ond that such bod­ies will ever wield any actu­al pow­er in American courts.”) closed quote.
That was an inte­gral part of my argu­ments in my most recent pod­cast.
Despite the heavy prsence of so-called human rights agen­cies in Jamaica, includ­ing the (IACHR) and their undue influ­ence in our law enforce­ment efforts they have zero influ­ence or pow­er over a sin­gle one of the thou­sands of police depart­ments in the United States, ragard­less of their crimes.

In Jamaica, we want an account­able police depart­ment, free from crim­i­nal con­duct. Nevertheless, we also want to see a police depart­ment uncon­strained by the likes of the IACHR, and oth­ers which has no pow­er in America, despite hun­dreds of bla­tant police killing of unarmed black cit­i­zens each year.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He also writes occa­sion­al­ly for the web­site Medium​.com.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.