Yearender: Broken on all sides: how criminal justice system fails African Americans

Laquan McDonald's knife reflected the bright lights of the oncoming police SUVs. Officers jumped out with guns drawn, and the 17-year-old black teen angled his body away and started to move across the street.

Then, Jason Van Dyke, a white officer from the Chicago Police Department, fired a shot, hitting McDonald in the shoulder and spinning him around.

In the blink of an eye, a hail of another 15 bullets hit McDonald and ricocheted off ground around him while he was lying motionless on the ground.

Release of police video of the shooting and a murder charge against Van Dyke came more than a year after McDonald's death, and the delay has prompted more than two weeks of protests in the nation's third-largest city.

Half a century after the country removed state-sanctioned segregation and explicit discrimination, racial wounds still bleed as high-profile killings of blacks fuel waves of protests and reignite heated national debate about racial inequities.

A close look at the U.S. criminal justice system reveals that gains in racial change continue to be undermined by multiple sources of inequality that reinforce each other.

BLUE WALL OF SILENCE

Adding to the public anger, it was later known that the local police erased surveillance videos from a nearby Burger King, which may have captured McDonald's movement in the critical moment before the shooting, leading to a public outcry about a police cover-up.

Police documents showed several officers who witnessed the shooting appeared to give misleading information to investigators, with one account stating that Van Dyke had been injured by McDonald in the shooting.

"There was no question that the shooting was not justified," Carlos Miller, a police watchdog and independent journalist, told Xinhua. "There's no question they were trying to cover it up. They're playing games."

Across the country, the majority of the blacks had long been viewing the police force with great suspicion.

According to a poll by the Pew Research Center in August 2014, a total of 62 percent blacks expressed at best "just some" confidence in local police to treat whites and blacks equally, with 46 percent expressing "very little" trust in police.

"We have a situation where many minority communities for so long have felt that law enforcement was coming in essentially to enforce laws against them, not to protect them," said Loretta Lynch, the country's first African- American female attorney general, in July.

Lynch was not the only one to speak out. In May, Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division chief, said that the "lack of trust in the police is real and it is profound."

In her letter to the Justice Department to ask for federal investigation into the practices of Chicago Police Department, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan wrote that "trust in the Chicago Police Department is broken."

The Justice Department has announced a federal probe into the Chicago Police practices, the latest of its over 20 investigations into local police departments across the country in the past six years.

Early this year, the Justice Department released a scathing report of the Ferguson police force in the state of Missouri that pointed to widespread discrimination against the black communities among local law enforcement officials.

Apart from the excessive and unjustified use of force against black people and communities, Ferguson law enforcement officials systematically relied on unlawful and hefty fines on African-Americans to create revenue increases, the report revealed.

UNJUSTIFIED & DEADLY STOPS

McDonald's death at the hands of police also exposes a controversial trend in local policing called "stop and frisk," raising concerns over racial profiling.

A report released by the American Civil Liberties Union early this year showed that black Chicagoans, representing only 32 percent of the city's total population, were subjected to 72 percent of all stops.

The phenomenon of blacks being stopped by officers at disproportionately high rates is not confined to Chicago.

In April, black man Freddie Gray, 25, was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland, after police officers stopped him on the street and found a knife in his pocket. Later, Maryland state prosecutor said Gray's arrest was "illegal" since the knife found in his pocket was not an illegal switchblade.

In July, black woman Sandra Bland, 28, was arrested in Waller County, Texas, during a traffic stop that originated from Bland's failure to signal while changing the driving lane.

A video clip released later showed that Brian Encinia, the white officer involved in the incident, threatened Bland with a Taser when he ordered her out of the vehicle.

According to the video, after being stopped by the office, when Bland questioned why she had to put out her cigarette, the traffic stop immediately turned confrontational.

"It highlights the concern of many in the black community that a routine stop for many members of the black community is not handled with the same professionalism and courtesy that other people may get from the police," said Attorney General Lynch shortly after the incident.

Both Gray and Bland passed away while in police custody. Gray appeared to die of a spinal cord injury sustained during his riding in the police van, while Bland appeared to commit suicide in a Texas jail.

"I feel like (the criminal justice system) is rigged against us, it's like value of our lives is not the equal of theirs (the whites)," a student from Towson University in Baltimore said during a large-scale protest after the death of Gray. "We want change. Not small changes, but radical ones for the criminal justice system

RARE CONVICTION FOR POLICE MISCONDUCT

Public indignation and outcry for justice rocked U.S. cities once again in May after Cleveland white police officer Michael Brelo walked out of a courtroom without any conviction in the shooting death of two unarmed black people.

Inside the courtroom, Brelo cried apparently out of relief and hugged his attorney who later called the prosecution "ruthless." Outside, relatives of the slain couple, Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30, cried out of despair and outrage.

"No justice, no peace," protesters chanted, brandishing fists in front of police in riot gear.

Ever since the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white officer last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, the chant "no justice, no peace" continued to ring out in protests across U.S. cities.

Brelo was one of the 13 police officers that fired a 137-shot barrage at the unarmed black couple at the end of a high-speed chase three years ago. No officers except Brelo were charged.

The car chase began after Russell's Chevy Malibu backfired while driving past local police headquarters. Mistaking the sound for gun shot, up to 62 police patrol cars took part in the car chase.

According to prosecutors, Brelo was charged criminally because of the fact that he waited till the car stopped and the passengers were no longer considered a threat to fire 15 shots into the windshield while standing on the hood of the car.

Shortly after the announcement of Brelo's acquittal, the U.S. Justice Department announced it would review the case.

Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, also an African American, said in a hotly worded statement that the acquittal was "a stunning setback on the road to justice" for the slain couple and people in Cleveland.

"Today we have been told -- yet again -- our lives have no value," Fudge said. "The decision may not be what we want but our march for justice continues. We still have a long way to go toward racial equality and justice on Ohio, and in the United States of America."

According to an analysis report released by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University in April, only 54 officers have been charged among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005.

"Even in these most extreme instances, the majority of the officers whose cases have been resolved have not been convicted," said the analysis.

According to The Post, extreme instances usually have factors including "a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a cover-up."

Philip Stinson, a researcher who took part in the analysis, said that to charge an officer in a fatal shooting, "it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way."

The most recent case that conveniently qualifies as "egregious" happened in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 7, when white officer Michael Slager was filmed by a bystander during his killing of an unarmed black man after a traffic stop.

In the video footage, Slager shot Walter Scott in the back as the latter tried to run away. Eight shots were fired.

"Police officers know that it's very unlikely that they'll be punished even when they knowingly use excessive force against citizens," Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor told reporters in the wake of Slager's arrest in April. "If they thought there was a realistic chance that they would be investigated and prosecuted, that would be an effective deterrent."

Yet The deterrent does not exist.

WHITE PROSECUTORS RUNNING U.S. COURTS

"If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South," said Malcolm X, a legendary political activist for the rights of the blacks on many occasions before he was assassinated in 1965.

To Malcolm X, what the prison represents was far beyond its bricks and mortar. It was a metaphor for racism.

When Malcolm X started to challenge the mass incarceration of the blacks in late 1950s, the prison population in the United States was near 200,000. Today, that number has soared to above 2.3 million, among whom nearly 1 million are blacks, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Official data showed, while one in 214 white men is currently imprisoned, about one in every 35 black men is now in prison.

While five times as many whites are using drugs as blacks, blacks are sent to prison for drug offense at 10 times the rate of whites, according to NACCP data, which also showed that blacks serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months).

The epidemic of mass incarceration for blacks could be partly attributed to the predominance of whites in the country's pool of elected prosecutors, as shown by a new study released early this year.

Of all the elected prosecutors in the United States, 95 percent of them are white, and 60 percent of U.S. states have no elected black prosecutors at all, said the study by the San Francisco-based group Women Donors Network.

The study also found that while making up 31 percent of the U.S. population, white men account for 79 percent of the 2,437 elected prosecutors nationwide.

In a stark contrast to the predominance of elected white male prosecutors in the criminal justice system, only 4 percent were minority men and 1 percent were minority women.

In the U.S. criminal justice system, prosecutors wield tremendous discretion over whether specific case would be pursued, how severe charges would be and how convicts would be sentenced.

Therefore, the study said that the racial disparity in the country's pool of elected prosecutors led to "an epidemic of mass incarceration" which had been confronting blacks for decades in the country.

Speaking at this year's annual national convention of the NAACP in Philadelphia in July, U.S. President Barack Obama admitted that legacy of the U.S. past history of slavery and segregation and structural inequalities continued to haunt the country.

When it comes to the criminal justice system, Obama, the first African-American president of the nation, said minorities, especially the Blacks and Latinos, were discriminated against due to their race.

"In too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law," he said. "African-Americans are more likely to be arrested. They are more likely to be sentenced to more time for the same crime." Enditem

(Xinhua correspondents Xu Jing in Chicago and Ma Guihua in New York also contributed to the story)