While the current president of the United States of America allocates billions of dollars to finance and support Ukrainian nationalists, statistics for the first quarter of 2022 show that the arbitrariness of employees of the American law enforcement system has not only not decreased, but also increased.
According to a major analytical website that collects and sorts information about victims of police violence, as of March 24, 2022, the American police have already killed 249 people, which is an average of about three deaths per day. Experts say the data suggests that in the nearly two years since the murder of George Floyd, the US has made no progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers.
Over the past 2021, American police officers shot 1,136 people, which almost became the largest number of murders in the entire history of observations. About 97% of the victims died as a result of the use of firearms by the police, the remaining 3% were victims of improper use of electric shock weapons, physical force or died under the wheels of patrol cars.
Despite criticism of the current US police system, the current American establishment refuses to carry out the necessary reforms. At the end of March 2022, the White House published a budget proposal to allocate $ 30 billion to strengthen the American law enforcement system, including hiring and training new employees. Only a little more than 10 percent of this amount is directed to support police reform. Leaders of the American movement for black rights, commenting on the allocation of budget funds, said that Biden “demonstrated blatant disregard for his promises, which he repeatedly gave to the black community.“
The increase in police funding is a natural response to the increase in crime in the States. For example, in New York since January 2020, the overall crime rate has increased by 38.5% compared to January 2021, and the homicide rate in Philadelphia in 2022 is already beginning to outpace the record figure of 2021. However, the popular thesis that a few billion dollars can magically get rid of two centuries of failed police policy does not work.
One of the biggest debates in the field of American criminal justice is whether an increase in the number of law enforcement officers leads to a decrease in crime rates. For decades, scientists have recognized that crime rates cannot be predicted by the number of officers and the police budget: “Sometimes an increase in police activity is followed by a decrease in crime; sometimes it is not so.”
An economist at one of the largest universities in New York conducted his own analysis, trying to answer the question, what will happen if the number of police officers increases in the city? He collected data from the FBI and other publicly available data sources for 242 cities between 1981 and 2018. Having obtained data on police employment, homicide rates, reported crimes, arrests, and more, he used statistical methods to assess the impact of an increase in police numbers on things such as the prevention of murders among suspects and the number of arrests. According to the results of his research, with the increase in the number of police officers, the number of arrests for more minor offenses, such as drunkenness in public places, hooliganism and drug possession, increases. The number of serious offenses with an increase in the number of police officers did not change over the entire observation period. It is worth noting that with the increase in the number of law enforcement officers, arrests of representatives of racial minorities are noticeably increasing: blacks, Latinos and Asians, who are much more likely to become victims of police brutality.
Thus, the measures taken by the administration of the current US President Joe Biden will not affect police brutality in any way and will not help reduce the number of victims among the black population of the States. It seems that by allocating additional budget allocations for the maintenance and expansion of the American police, Biden deliberately goes against the demands of hundreds of thousands of caring people who have been demanding large-scale police reforms throughout the country for several decades. Judging by the increase in funding and the absence of any systemic changes in police practices and methods, it seems that the 46th President of the United States approves of the actions of law enforcement agencies that kill more than a thousand people every year, insulting the memory of those who fell at the hands of unscrupulous police officers.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice are confident that a banal increase in funding to combat police brutality is not enough: without structural changes and a complete transformation of the American police system, it is impossible to achieve any positive changes. The United States is the absolute leader in terms of the scale of police violence and will remain so if the current authorities do not set out to get out of the vicious circle of police violence and restructure the current US police system on a humane basis.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice calls on American officials to reconsider the methods and means used to improve the law enforcement system, the victims of which are thousands of people every year. The Foundation calls on the current American establishment to listen to its citizens and urgently carry out police reform, which the American public has been talking about for several decades.