The Baltimore Uprising and the U.S. Government's Record on
Human Rights
By Matt Peppe
May 05, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - On Friday, Baltimore
state's attorney Marilyn Mosby declared that six police officers will face
criminal charges including second degree heart murder, manslaughter,
assault and false imprisonment for their role in the arrest and homicide of
25-year-old African American Freddie Gray. While this is welcome and
encouraging news for those seeking justice for Gray and his family, past
experience demonstrates the odds the accused criminals will be convicted
are miniscule.
Regardless, it is not enough to treat the Freddie Gray incident as merely a
violation of domestic law. The actions by agents of the State are part of a
pattern of human rights abuses that are rampant against the domestic
population, especially ethnic and racial minorities. The crimes are not only
attributable to the indicted Baltimore officers but to the government they
represent, which has failed to deliver the human rights obligations owed to
all American citizens.
After the arrests of the six officers, residents continued
their protests in a clear indication that the outrage of the Baltimore
uprising is about much more than the mistreatment and killing of Freddie
Gray as an isolated incident. Interviewed on Friday by the
Baltimore Sun, Kevin Moore, who filmed the unlawful arrest of
Gray on his cell phone, said that "We're going to keep on marching for human
rights. We're going to keep on going until this stops -- the police
brutality."
Across the country, grassroots movements that have gained
momentum after the killings of unarmed African Americans including Michael
Brown, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Brandon-Tate Brown, and
Freddie Gray have focused on far-reaching political and economic demands.
They must be understood as a critique of the entire socioeconomic system
that oppresses minorities and manifests itself with excessive use of force
by agents of the state against members of these same disenfranchised
communities.
Critically, activists have stressed the connections between
police brutality, structural
economic inequalities, and the epidemic of
mass
incarceration that all target predominantly African Americans and
Latinos. Economic policies relegate African Americans to an impoverished
underclass. They are then attacked by the state through the criminal justice
system precisely for their social status. The prison system is used to
warehouse what is considered a surplus population that has no role in the
modern economy. Law enforcement officers take on the role of enforcers of
oppression.
As Michelle Alexander explains in
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,
"The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to
actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of
social control unparalleled in world history."
Police brutality carried out by law enforcement enforcing a racist drug war
is merely a symptom of the system of white supremacist-informed politics
that produces the nation's unequal social and economic structures.
Eliminating the violence of the enforcers would do nothing to eliminate the
violence of structural inequality that permeates American society.
Groups like #BlackLivesMatter recognize this and explicitly
state their grievances with the systemic factors behind individual crimes
against black people: "When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the
conversation around state violence to include all the ways in which Black
people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are
talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human
rights and dignity. How Black poverty and genocide is state violence. How
2.8 million Black people are locked in cages in this country is state
violence. How Black women bearing the burden of a relentless assault on our
children and our families is state violence."
We The Protesters write in an
Open Letter that they seek to "build a community that is empowered to
establish a new political and social reality that respects and affirms
blackness and the humanity therein."
When Freddie Gray was killed, agents of the state violated
many of his human rights. as defined in the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Namely, he was deprived of his right to life and liberty
(Article 3); he was subjected to torture and degrading treatment (Article
5); he was subjected to arbitrary arrest (Article 9); and he was subjected
to arbitrary interference with his privacy (Article 12).
Possibly the only thing unique about Gray's treatment at the
hands of Baltimore police is the scale of the uprising it gave rise to among
his community members. As a
Baltimore
Sun investigation revealed, city residents have had to pay out
nearly $6 million in the last four years to settle more than 100 lawsuits
alleging "that police officers brazenly beat up alleged suspects." The
victims ranged from young children to old women. Even City Council President
Bernard C. "Jack" Young told the paper that "[residents] fear the police
more than they fear the drug dealers on the corner." And the situation in
Baltimore is not unique to the rest of the United States.
The
United Nations Human Rights Committee declared in its most recent report
they were "concerned about the still high number of fatal shootings by
certain police forces ... and reports of excessive force by certain law
enforcement officers, including the deadly use of tasers, which has a
disparate impact on African Americans." The Committee also also expressed
its concern about "racial disparities at different stages in the criminal
justice system, as well as sentencing disparities and the overrepresentation
of individuals belonging to racial and ethnic minorities in prisons and
jails."
If the United States had ratified the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and was
subject to review by the United Nations, the findings would be equally
damning, or likely worse. How many Baltimore residents - or those of any
major U.S. city - would feel that their government was delivering their
right "to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family,
including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous
improvement of living conditions" (Article 11)? Or "a decent living for
themselves and their families" (Article 7)? The right to "the highest
attainable standard of physical and mental health" (Article 12)?
Last month,
MintPress News reported that the city of Baltimore has issued
notices to residential water customers with overdue accounts that their
service will be shut-off. They note that United Nations experts "were among
many who expressed concern that water shut-offs violate basic human rights."
Freddie Gray, like many residents of Baltimore, was exposed to
lead paint in his childhood home. Lead paint exposure by children has
been proven to result in potentially disastrous development problems.
The
Washington Post writes that it is "hard to know whether Gray's
problems were exclusively borne of lead poisoning or were the result of
other socioeconomic factors as well. From birth, his was a life of
intractable poverty that would have been challenging to overcome." The
socioeconomic factors must be attributed directly to the state that created
them and failed to remedy them for Gray and millions of others.
If protesters were polled about whether the government was
fulfilling its human rights obligations to provide basic social and economic
rights, is there any doubt that they would nearly unanimously disagree?
Could city, state or federal officials even claim to enjoy the consent of
the governed among African American communities that have been victimized
for decades, if not centuries, of structural inequalities and aggressive
policing meant to repress people through a cruel system of social control?
Many voices on the street are loudly calling for an
indictment of the system as a whole. The difference between this American
movement and other color revolutions overseas that receive much corporate
media attention is that it is entirely homegrown and a product of grassroots
reaction to oppression, rather than a manufactured product of foreign
funding and training.
U.S. government officials have never hesitated to decry
alleged human rights abuses by the regimes of official enemies. One year
ago, Secretary of State John
Kerry accuses Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of carrying out a
"terror campaign against his own people" who did not "respect human rights."
Kerry neglected to mention that half of the deaths resulting from the
protests were of security agents and government supporters, some who were
decapitated by barbed wire
barricades erected by anti-socialist protesters.
The U.S. government has showered middle and upper-class
Venezuelan students and pro-business interests with
millions of dollars in funding and organizational training to
provoke protests they could then condemn for political purposes.
The same is true in Ukraine, Syria, Cuba, Hong Kong and across the world.
What justification do they have to spend the nation's resources to
manufacture opposition abroad rather than address the demands of citizens at
home opposed to the inequality and insecurity that the state subjects them
to, and which they could drastically reduce or outright eliminate, through
taxation of private wealth and redistribution, if they chose to?
Freddie Gray has become a martyr for the suffering he endured
throughout his life at the hands of the social, economic, and political
system he lived under, rather than just for his suffering at the hands of
the six police officers who ended his life. The Baltimore uprising will not
end with the verdicts against the six officers. It will only end when the
people of Baltimore and cities across the U.S. are able to hold the people
who design the policies that deprive them of their fundamental human rights
accountable.
Matt Peppe blogs at
http://mattpeppe.blogspot.com
