US should practice what it preaches

Editor, Refer to Sunny Ntayombya’s article, “World Policeman? Perhaps when US cops stop brutalising blacks and getting away with it” (The New Times, June 10). The officer resigned right after the incident. There is a reality that has to be acknowledged: the police in the United States are 99.9 per cent fair and very professional. The 0.1 per cent of bad cops cannot be seen as true depiction of the country’s police. John Gahindiro ******************* Mr Gahindiro’s claim that “the US police are 99.9 per cent fair” is the most hilarious assertion I have had read in this newspaper. Let him go tell that to the thousands of black American victims of that “fair” institution and the families who never get justice after their loved one have been murdered by police. Just calculate: if we are seeing so many cases across the US – of police’s brutal killing of unarmed innocent black men, and even boys as young as twelve and young black girls – how many similar police abuses of black people pass unreported? Make no mistake, the recorded incidents are just a small fraction, a tip of a very a large iceberg. Does anyone really believe that in a country where black people make up 12 per cent of the population and yet constitute 43 per cent of the prison population (close to 2.5 million) is fair? That means, by the way, there are more black people incarcerated in the US than the total number of prisoners in all the 54 countries on the African continent. And because many of those US black prisoners are in privately-run prisons, which rent out prison labour cheaply to nearby industries, what you really have are millions of modern day slaves! What’s obvious is that neither the American police nor its judicial system is fair to blacks in America. We certainly don’t want the US extending its “fair” treatment of black people in America beyond its borders. Mwene Kalinda ******************* Mr. Gahindiro, it seems you didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand Sunny Ntayombya’s point. He is asking why the US would spend time and resources investigating corruption and human rights in other countries/organisations before, first of, all doing the same in their own backyard. How many unarmed, unprovocative black Americans have been shot dead while fleeing from the very police that are supposed to protect them? How are Rwanda’s problems US’s? Do we share borders; do we harbour Al-Qaeda? Karoli Karambizi

Opinions

US should practice what it preaches