Nobility Without Accountability Is Called Hypocrisy .….…

If you are going to lec­ture oth­er nations on human rights, you damn sure bet­ter have your human rights record intact. And so when America decides to become the arbiter on what human rights look like, it was and is always fair that those coun­tries look at what America’s human rights record looks like.
It is, there­fore, no sur­prise that Russia, China, Iran, and oth­ers laugh at the United States’ record on human rights when chal­lenged on their record.
It is noble to be a voice that speaks out against human rights abus­es glob­al­ly. Still, nobil­i­ty with­out account­abil­i­ty is called hypocrisy .….…and that is where nations are draw­ing the lines.

In seek­ing to cement its author­i­ty on the rest of the world, part of what the United States has done has been to cut fund­ing to coun­tries whose secu­ri­ty forces it has deemed to be in con­tra­ven­tion of accept­able inter­na­tion­al norms.
Many small coun­tries, includ­ing Jamaica with lim­it­ed resources, have strug­gled to main­tain order and deal with the mass influx of ille­gal American guns flood­ing the Island through their porous borders.
In deal­ing with those transna­tion­al chal­lenges, the secu­ri­ty forces have some­times had to resort to uncon­ven­tion­al means and, in the process, seen fund­ing from the United States cut and the visas of indi­vid­ual offi­cers revoked.

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But were those ham­fist­ed approach­es always jus­ti­fied giv­en America’s own heavy-hand­ed approach to deal­ing with its own cit­i­zens who com­mit far less seri­ous transgressions?
Is the American approach legit­i­mate giv­en America’s shame­ful his­to­ry regard­ing how it has han­dled its African-American and Native-American pop­u­la­tion, or even what it did to the Japanese pop­u­la­tion dur­ing World War II?
But while America’s his­to­ry on race rela­tions has been any­thing but good, its con­tin­ued oppres­sion of racial minori­ties leg­isla­tive­ly is even more shock­ing, as the world watch­es in hor­ror the play­ing ou of ver­i­ta­ble exe­cu­tion dai­ly of American cit­i­zens by agents of the state.
It is not just that state agents kill; the lev­el of cal­lous­ness and bru­tal­i­ty that char­ac­ter­izes those killings make them nauseating.

Surely, state actors who act with such impuni­ty must be con­fi­dent in the sys­tem they serve to pro­tect them from account­abil­i­ty, and it sure does.
New York Times writ­ers John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro wrote in 2020, “A famed Black artist is beat­en by two police offi­cers in Midtown Manhattan and false­ly charged. It sounds like it could be any one of count­less news sto­ries from the past year, but in fact, we’re talk­ing about 1959. The artist was Miles Davis. in the eyes of the American pub­lic, Davis was an icon. In the eyes of the New York City Police Department, he was Black”.

The sav­agery of American police is not man­i­fest­ed only in the every­day killings, usu­al­ly of unarmed cit­i­zens. People expe­ri­enc­ing men­tal break­downs run­ning around naked are not spared a bar­rage of bul­lets; it is man­i­fest­ed in the beat­ings that occur with such fre­quen­cy that they do not get cov­ered by the media.
Today, thanks to cell­phones with cam­eras and the pow­er of social media, cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists can show­case the grue­some bar­barism and the cal­lous ani­mal­is­tic sav­agery of what pass­es for polic­ing in the United States.
As that hap­pens and the world becomes more sen­si­tized to what has real­ly been hap­pen­ing while American lec­tures them for far less­er trans­gres­sions, I have cau­tioned that across America and even at the Federal lev­el, expect that leg­is­la­tures will begin tak­ing away the right to film cops.
Already police have been approach­ing inno­cent cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists claim­ing to divide their atten­tion between what they are doing and the cam­era per­son film­ing them.
They know that the per­son film­ing pos­es no threat to them except when they break the laws. Still, by con­tin­u­al­ly claim­ing that it is a secu­ri­ty issue to them and the vic­tim they stop and abuse, Republicans will begin draft­ing laws sup­pos­ed­ly to pro­tect the peo­ple stopped; when cleary those laws will be aimed at giv­ing police more cov­er to com­mit more atroc­i­ties against those they hate.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.