Full text: The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021

II. ENTRENCHED VIOLENT THINKING THREATENS LIVES

The United States has consistently had one of the highest rates of violent crimes in the world. Gun control measures have been stagnant and gun violence has been rife. The police are discriminatory in law enforcement, killing innocent people and causing public anger. Law enforcement officers commit crimes with impunity, and judicial injustice has been widely criticized. Wrongful and unjust cases continue to exist without being corrected and compensated effectively. Prison inmates are abused, and domestic violence as well as youth violence has increased significantly. The American people live in fear of lack of security.

Deterioration of social order has accelerated the proliferation of guns. The United States is the country with the largest number of privately owned guns in the world. The US public have lost confidence in the government's social security governance and felt extremely insecure, which drives many to purchase guns to protect themselves.

The Small Arms Survey (SAS) researchers estimate that Americans own 393 million of the 857 million civilian guns available, which is around 46 percent of the world's civilian gun cache.

There are 120 guns for every 100 Americans, according to the SAS. No other nation has more civilian guns than people.

Everytown for Gun Safety also reported on Dec 21, 2021 that over 15 million guns were sold through October.

"Ghost guns," which are assembled from parts purchased by individuals online, are even more proliferating.

According to a report by The New York Times website on Nov 20, 2021, over the past 18 months, ghost guns had accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes.

By the beginning of October last year, the San Diego Police Department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about doubling the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year.

It also reported that since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms had been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Gun violence seriously endangers people's lives. The United States has the worst gun violence in the world. According to statistics released on Jan 5, 2022 by the Gun Violence Archive website, the number of fatalities from shootings in the United States rose from 39,558 in 2019 to 43,643 in 2020, and further to 44,816 in 2021. In 2021, there were 693 mass shootings in the United States, up 10.1 percent from 2020.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Oct 5, 2021 that children and teens in the United States are 15 times more likely to die from gunfire than their peers in 31 other high-income countries combined, quoting data from the Children's Defense Fund.

At least 30 shootings occurred on US campuses during the school season from Aug 1 to Sept 15, 2021, killing at least five people and injuring 23, the highest number on record.

A total of 1,229 teens aged 12 to 17 were killed and 3,373 injured in shootings in the United States in 2021. On Nov 30, 2021, four students were killed in a mass shooting at a Michigan high school by a 15-year-old suspect who used the same gun that his father bought on Black Friday.

CNN reported on Nov 26, 2021 that Jason R. Silva, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at William Paterson University, said that the United States is the only developed country where mass shootings have happened every single year for the past 20 years.

Shooting incidents have caused a large number of casualties and posed a major threat to public safety. According to an April 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 48 percent of Americans see gun violence as a very big problem in the country today.

Police brutality tramples human life. According to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence, at least 1,124 people died in 2021 due to US police violence. The majority of killings occurred during non-violent offenses or when there was no crime at all.

The USA TODAY website reported on June 21, 2021 that police in the United States fatally shoot about 1,000 people a year. Police have fatally shot more than 6,300 people since 2015, but only 91 officers have been arrested, or just 1 percent of those involved.

The USA TODAY website reported on July 8, 2021 that a poll showed that just 22 percent of Americans believe that the US police treat all Americans equally.

Racial and ethnic groups are often subjected to unfair justice. The USA TODAY website reported on July 15, 2021 that a 20-year-old African-American man in Minnesota, Daunte Wright, was shot and killed by police after being pulled over outside Minneapolis for an expired license plate. Wright's death was one of a string of incidents in which African-Americans were pulled over for traffic violations and killed innocently.

A study of 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina over more than a decade shows that African American drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to be pulled over by police.

The USA TODAY website reported on May 24, 2021 that within a year of the death of George Floyd, who died after an officer knelt on his neck for nine minutes, enforcement killed hundreds of people of ethnic minorities in the United States.

According to the report, since the year 2000, there have been over 470 murders at the hands of law enforcement in Minnesota. Only one police officer was convicted in the history of Minnesota and that was a minority man that killed a white woman.

The Christian Science Monitor website reported on Nov 23, 2021 that the Urban Institute found that homicides with a white perpetrator and a black victim are ten times more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a black perpetrator and a white victim.

Human rights violations by prison staff are commonplace. The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the highest number of incarcerated people in the world. An Associated Press investigation has found that the US federal Bureau of Prisons is a hotbed of graft, corruption and abuse.

CTV News reported on Nov 14, 2021 that crimes committed by federal prison staff in the United States are not uncommon. Since 2019, more than 100 US federal prison staff members have been arrested and convicted of sexual abuse, murder and other offenses.

Prisoners held in US private prisons are at risk of being abused. The UN News reported on Feb 4, 2021 that in 2019, there were about 116,000 US prisoners held in privately operated facilities, representing about 7 percent of all state prisoners and 16 percent of federal prisoners, quoting data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

On April 20, 2021, nine UN experts, including the UN Human Rights Council Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Independent Expert on the Enjoyment of all Human Rights by Older Persons, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Physical and Mental Health, issued a joint statement condemning US human rights violations against Mumia Abu-Jamal, a prisoner of African descent.

The statement said Abu-Jamal, who has been in prison for 40 years, was a social activist and journalist. The 67-year-old suffers from a number of diseases including chronic heart disease, liver cirrhosis and high blood pressure. In February 2021, he was diagnosed with COVID-19. While receiving treatment for heart failure in late February, he was handcuffed to his hospital bed for four days; and when he was hospitalized again in early April for surgery, his family, lawyers and others were denied access to him.

The statement calls on the US government to comply with its international human rights obligations, take urgent measures to protect Abu-Jamal's life and dignity, immediately stop the practice of withholding information, and allow outside visits to monitor his human rights situation.

It also calls on the US government to take all necessary measures to protect the lives of all detainees, especially the elderly and disabled prisoners who are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

The credibility of the US judicial system is in tatters. According to statistics released by the US National Registry of Exoneration on Jan 11, 2022, 2,933 people have been wrongly convicted in the United States since 1989, with a combined 25,600 years of wrongly imposed prison sentences. However, 14 US states lack legal provisions related to compensation for wrongful convictions.

The BBC reported on Nov 23, 2021, that Kevin Strickland, 62, had maintained his innocence since his arrest at the age of 18. He was wrongly convicted of third-degree murder in June 1979, only to be found not guilty in 2021 before being imprisoned for more than 42 years, the longest wrongful imprisonment in Missouri history. But under the state's law, he is unlikely to receive any financial compensation.

The USA Today website reported on July 8, 2021, that a survey showed that only 17 percent of Americans believe the US criminal justice system treats everyone fairly.