A young Bangladeshi-American was shot dead by the police in Cambridge, USA. This death has inflamed spontaneous protests and infuriated the Bangladeshi community residing in the United States. Flagrant acts of police brutality have witnessed a violent upsurge in recent years and has triggered considerable mass discontent and backlash. Police shootings remain an enduring issue in the United States, sporadically inciting protests and calls for systematic overhaul of the policing.
The issue of police violence in the United States came to fore following the public backlash in the wake of George Floyd's very public murder in Minneapolis more than two years ago. However, despite the vociferous outrage, police violence remains well-entrenched, as evident from the recent murder of Sayed Faisal.
Between 1980 and 2018, an estimated 30,000 people have lost their lives owing to police violence in the United States, according to an article in The Lancet. In 2022, the tally of murders due to police violence stands at 1,176 individuals, turning the year the grimmest year in terms of police violence. This is following the mass outrage sparked by the death of George Floyd, indicating that the system that fosters police violence is still in place. This also indicates utter apathy regarding police violence by US policy-makers despite the palpable mass discontent.
Police violence in the United States is predominantly “coloured,” implying that people of colour are subjected to a disproportionate amount of the violence.
Whenever a scintilla of human rights violations by other nations comes on the US's radar, the hegemon soon springs to action and deploys human rights issues to sully the image of those countries. Likewise, historical precedents illustrate that the human rights of the US foreign policy are geared towards projecting broader politico-strategic interests, rather than solely steeped in idealistic altruism.
This is more conspicuous as the US has overlooked blatant human rights violations in countries that it deems “strategically consequential” while leveraging human rights to pressure and shame nations that are not deemed as such.
Last year, the United States slapped sanctions on Bangladesh's RAB on the grounds of alleged human rights violations carried out by the force. The decision to impose the sanction is striking, since in the document that promulgated the sanction, Bangladesh was mentioned in the same breadth as the rogue regimes, while it is apparent that the offense was far less grave than the actions it had elicited.
When one juxtaposes the issue of sanctions on Bangladesh and the recent shooting in the United States, one cannot help but be puzzled by the widening inconsistencies between the actions of the United States and the ideals it pontificates.
Thus, the abysmal state of police violence in the United States shows that the moral outrage that the country feigns at the hint of flimsy violation in far-fetched countries is often driven by overarching strategic interest.
This begs the question: Who will sanction the colossus?
The human rights issue that the US seeks laboriously to champion is unidirectional and imperial. The narrative of human rights is a mere strategic artifice to subjugate developing countries under its enduring surveillance. However, the question arises as to who lends the United States the elevated moral pulpit to decree over other countries, when the domestic situation in the United States is riven with instability.
Without fixing the domestic issues first, the imperial overstretch of the United States and preoccupation with other countries will further debilitate them. It is axiomatic that leaders wield influence through examples. However, the unsavoury human rights conditions in the United States laid bare the teeterin domestic order of the country.
Thus, the United States' sanctimonious stance at the world stage reeks of hypocrisy. While the rhetoric of the United States paints utopian idealism with a universal brush, the fact that the United States fails to follow these standards themselves questions their credibility as the de facto arbiter of moral fortitude.
Nanziba Mahmood is a freelance contributor.