US police violence against minority communities consequence of bottled-up racial prejudice: Nigerian expert

ABUJA - A Nigerian expert slammed the recent killing of a 26-year-old refugee from Congo in the US state of Michigan by a white police officer as another example of systematic pattern of police violence and brutality targeted at minority communities.

In a column article on the website of Nigeria's daily the Blueprint on Sunday, Charles Onunaiju, an international affairs analyst based in Abuja, said despite the global outrage and protests that trailed the gruesome murder of the 46-year-old African-American, George Floyd, on May 25, 2020, by a white American police, nothing seemed to have changed in "the systematic pattern of police violence and brutality targeted at African-American or blacks in the United States."

"Between the brutal murder of Floyd in a heart-wrenching manner and the latest murder of a 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya, when a white police officer wrestled him down and shot him at the back of his head in an execution-style manner, police violence, brutality and abuses have not abated," said Onunaiju.

He said the institutional process of policing in the United States, with obvious bias against minority communities, especially the African-Americans have continued.

"Each brutal murder of African-Americans by the police which are almost and evidently un-provoked, the measures to prevent or avoid the next of such brutal murder appear modest and half-hearted as if to suggest that police violence targeted at black people are embedded in the policing framework in the United States," Onunaiju said.

He said most of the white police murder and violence against the blacks always seemed premeditated and consequence of bottled-up racial prejudice.

"The long enduring bile of racial intolerance and prejudice long-simmering in the United States but camouflaged by expansive rhetoric on equality, human rights and democracy feeds into the mental frame of any white police officer that blacks are quite expendables whose lives could be brutally cut short with a considerable degree of institutional acquiesce," he said.

The expert urged African governments and African voices including political parties, trade union movements and other civic groups not to remain aloof and unconcerned while African-Americans and the black community in general are relentlessly brought under the pressure of police violence and brutality in the United States.

He said the US government makes a ritual of publishing records of human rights abuses in Africa and yet it remains of huge concern and even worry that no African government has so far documented and published escalating cases of rights violations in the United States.

"While such peer reviews of rights violations might unnerve the arrogant US political establishment, such efforts by African governments to track, document and publish annual reports on human right violations in the United States, may actually spur a ground breaking institutional and systemic reform ... for racial prejudice and the abuses," the expert said.