Shocked by the death of Tire Nichols, the United States is once again opening the debate on police violence. The 29-year-old African-American, a no-nonsense FedEx employee in Tennessee and father of a 4-year-old child, died in hospital three days after being beaten to death by black police officers of Memphis, who have since been charged with murder. “It’s sad we’re still here in America, I can’t believe it,” said CNN Lora King, daughter of Rodney King, whose beating by police in 1991 had inflamed Los Angeles.
The murder of the African-American George Floyd, suffocated under the knee of a white policeman, had however aroused a historic mobilization in the spring of 2020. And, under pressure from the street, promises of reform had flowered in all the States united without altering a police system based on brutality.
Two years later, the number of people who died during interactions with the police broke a sad record, with 1,096 deaths for the year 2022, according to the annual count of washington post. This figure has increased slightly every year since 2015, the date of the first census established by the American daily, which had undertaken this count after the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American who had been shot six times, in Ferguson (Missouri). ). The young man, suspected of theft, was unarmed, and his death on August 9, 2014 provoked demonstrations leading to the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement.
African Americans 2.5 times more killed than whites
In 2022, three people per day thus died in the United States at the hands of police officers on duty – the figures of the newspaper differ from those of the authorities. In 2021, only a third of the departments’ fatal shootings appeared in the FBI database in this way, points out the Washington Post. For the American daily, this is explained “largely by the fact that local police services are not required to report these incidents to the federal government”. Another aggravating factor: “the update of the FBI’s data reporting system and the confusion within local police departments about reporting responsibilities”.
In total, since the beginning of the countdown of the washington post, 8,079 people died. African-Americans (1,905 dead for 40 million inhabitants) are proportionally killed 2.5 times more than non-Hispanic whites (3,593 dead since 2015 for 192 million inhabitants). Nearly six black people per million inhabitants are thus killed each year by the police, compared to just over two white people. Latin Americans (1,286 deaths since 2015 for 62 million inhabitants) are 10% more likely than whites to be targeted by the police. More than half of the dead are between 20 and 40 years old, and 95% of them are men.
Arms proliferation
Experts attribute this violence to the proliferation of weapons in a country which records around 25,000 homicides a year (compared to around 1,050 in France). According to data collected from the press and independent or governmental organizations, this phenomenon is much more important in the United States than in other Western countries. In 2021, the French police thus killed 6 times less on its soil (37 dead) than the American police (1,048 dead), in proportion to the population of the two countries. The gap is even greater with Germany (8 victims), whose officers killed 45 times less than their American counterparts.
However, this trend must be considered with caution due to the Covid-19 epidemic which, with confinements and curfews, reduced human activities in 2020 and 2021. In his latest reportthe General Directorate of the National Police (IGPN), underlines that “the return to a normal situation, freed from constraints and measures restricting individual freedoms, may raise fears in 2022 of an upward trend in legal referrals such as ‘started before the health crisis’.