Power abuse and overuse of force by US police severe
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E-mail Xinhua, May 25, 2012
Abuse of power, brutal enforcement of law and overuse of force by U.S. police have resulted in harassment and hurt to a large number of innocent citizens and have caused loss of freedom of some people or even deaths, said a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Friday.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 was released by the Information Office of China's State Council in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 issued by the U.S. Department of State on Thursday.
According to a report carried by the World Journal on June 10, 2011, the past decade saw increasing stop-and-frisks by the New York police, which recorded an annual of 600,000 cases in 2010, almost double of that in 2004.
In the first three months of 2011, some 180,000 people experienced stop-and-frisks, 88 percent of whom were innocent people, the report quoted.
The United States remains the country with the largest "prison population" and the highest per capita level of imprisonment in the world, and the detention centers' conditions are terrible, it said.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of prisoners amounted to 2.3 million in 2009 and one in every 132 American citizens is behind bars. Meanwhile, more than 140,000 are serving life sentences.
The U.S. lacks basic due lawsuit process protections, and its government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion, the report said.
The National Defense Authorization Act, signed on Dec. 31, 2011, allows for the indefinite detention of citizens, the report said, adding that the Act will place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists.
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