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Keith Scott

Tichaona Zindoga : Political Editor

A town called Charlotte in the United States’ state of North Carolina is burning. Yet another black man was fatally shot by police three days ago, prompting violent protests and declaration of a state of emergency by authorities. The man’s name was Keith Scott, aged 43. He is survived by seven children and a wife, Rakeyia.Scott, according to reports, was killed when police, who wanted to serve a warrant intended for another individual, opened fire on him as he exited his car.

Police claim he was armed, an allegation refuted by his family and eyewitnesses who say he was holding a book.

Scott’s death follows hard on the heels of the shooting to death of Terence Crutcher last Friday in the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma by Police Officer Betty Shelby after the 40-year-old’s blackman’s car was found abandoned in the middle of the road.

Terence Crutcher

He was unarmed when Shelby shot him. The script reads familiar: Scott is, according to data compiled by the Washington Post as of yesterday, about the 704th person of the 706 people killed by US police this year.

Last year, 990 people were killed in this “fatal force” and the majority of them were black males and the issue of police brutality has taken a significant stage in America where there is a surfeit of such incidents.

He was unarmed with his hands raised when he was fatally shot by a white police officer. The situation has played out over and over again and has been compared to a state-sanctioned genocide and racial lynching.

Many observers have put these extra-judicial killings and use of fatal force down to institutionalised racism.

According to Alertnet one black man is killed every 28 hours by American police or vigilantes.

“These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face.

“Mass incarceration of non-whites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13,1 percent of the nation’s population, they make up nearly 40 percent of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2,8 to 5,5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for non-violent drug offences,” notes Alertnet.

In Zimbabwe analysts say the US and other Western countries act hypocritically when they cry blue murder on the so-called brutality of police.

They have poured scorn on some activists and political parties that are running to the US and other Western countries to complain about the alleged police brutality in a country where such fatalities are so close to non-existent.

For their own hypocritical part, US and other Western embassies have issued statements seeking to condemn the ZRP when the law enforcement agents put down unsanctioned or violent rioters using simple and unsophisticated techniques such as water canon and teargas.

By contrast in the US the authorities use sophisticated and specialised and highly militarised equipment to quell rioters.

Apart from low grade equipment such as teargas and water cannon and pepper spray, riot police in United States also use a smoke bombs — fireworks that generate smoke after ignition — wooden bullets, bean-bag rounds, audio devices and tasers, all of which account for occasional deaths.

The security forces also beat up protesters in “baton charges” using clubs and riot shields, “forcing people away from the scene due to the actual impact or just the fear of being struck”.

There is a range of weapons known as “wave weapons” and these include stun guns and Tasers that use electro-shock pulses to incapacitate people and this led to the deaths of more than 100 between 2000 and 2005.

The killing of especially black people in America has given rise to what is known as the Black Lives Movement, which is a civic movement meant to protest police brutality against black civilians.

Racial tension is high in Charlotte — and it is said to be the institutional and systemic problem with American police. The issue has also become political.

Yesterday, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential hopeful, blamed President Barack Obama, suggesting that the violent protests there highlight a racial divide in America that Obama has failed to mend as president.

He said there was “a lack of spirit between the white and the black.”

“Well, it really has to be — you have to have law and order at the time, you have to have, you know, you have to have a certain spirit, a certain unity and there’s no unity,” Trump was quoted as saying.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was even more explicit in an interview with Fox News saying:

“First of all, it’s a tragedy that eight years after our first African-American president took office, eight years after we’ve had two African-American attorney generals, the gap and the hostility, if anything, is worse and I think that’s a tragic failure of leadership.”