Civil rights are threatened by rampant violent crimes. According to the “Crime in the United States” released by the FBI, there were an estimated 1,163,146 violent crimes reported to law enforcement in 2013, of which 14,196 are murders, 79,770 are rapes, 345,031 robberies and 724,149 aggravated assaults (http://www.fbi.gov.) There were an estimated 367.9 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013. The Market Watch announced 10 most dangerous cities in America (www.marketwatch.com, November 20, 2014)). The lowest ranking of the ten was Birmingham in Alabama, where 1,345 crimes were reported for every 100,000 residents, while in Detroit, 2,072 violent crimes were reported for 100,000 residents, the highest in the nation in 2013. In 2014, Los Angeles’s overall total of violent crimes was up 7.6 percent by early October, compared with the same time in 2013 (The Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2014). There was about 1,500 violent crimes registered a month in 2014. Meanwhile, gang violence in the U.S. was at an all time high. There were currently an estimated 1.7 million gang members spread throughout the country (www.insidermonkey.com, November 1, 2014).
Police officers were ignoring sex crimes on a regular basis. A report released in November by the inspector general of New Orleans found that of 1,290 sex crime calls for service assigned to five New Orleans police detectives from 2011 to 2013, 840 were designated as miscellaneous, and nothing at all was done (The New York Times, November 13, 2014).
Police and prosecutors were allowing tens of thousands of wanted felons to escape justice merely by crossing a state border (The USA Today, March 12, 2014).
The Wall Street Journal reported on December 3, 2014, that many of the law enforcement agencies did not submit the statistics about killings by police when enforcing laws to the FBI. The report found at least 1,800 police killings took place in 105 police departments between 2007 and 2012. The Associated Press reported on December 7, 2014 that at least 400 deaths happened every year as a result of the law enforcement activities by the U.S. police officers, most of who were not prosecuted. And some police officers had repeated killings on record, though they were investigated for every case. There were 55 police officers who were sued at least 10 times with one being sued for 28 times. Los Angeles Times reported on September 14 that since 2004 a committee reviewed 809 complaints of excessive force or misconduct at the Southwest border, but no police officers had been punished.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal privacy watchdog, concluded that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program to bulk phone call records was illegal (The New York Times, January 23, 2014).
Prisons in the U.S. were crowded and violence and deaths there were increasing. According to a report titled “Prisoners in 2013” by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. state and federal correctional facilities held an estimated 1,574,700 prisoners on December 31, 2013, an increase of 4,300 prisoners from yearend 2012 (www.bjs.gov, September 16, 2014).
….violence in prisons was occurring frequently. In 2012, 4,309 inmates died while in the custody of local jails or state prisons (www.bjs.gov, October 9, 2014). The number of deaths in local jails increased, from 889 in 2011 to 958 in 2012. In Rikers Island, a vast New York City jail complex, the use of force by correction officers jumped nearly 240 percent over the last decade since 2004 (The New York Times, March 19, 2014). In the Julia Tutwiler Prison in Alabama, there was a large amount of complaints about the sex abuse and harassment involving guards and supervisors. However, state investigators time and again classified the complaints as unfounded or unsubstantiated and often recommended that the matters be closed without further action (The Washington Post, October 6, 2014).
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said that the world sees “a democracy that’s not working” (www.usatoday.com, October 11, 2013). It revealed the institutional root for the fact that the political rights of U.S. citizens had not been effectively protected.
Money is still a deciding factor for the U.S. politics…..The influence of average Americans on the election results diminished (www.usatoday.com, November 2, 2014).
The voting rights in the U.S. are restricted by economic income, race and other factors, and many citizens were prevented from voting.
According to a report by the Huffington Post on December 2, 2014, only nine percent of Americans approved of Congress in the weeks leading up to the midterms elections (www.huffingtonpost.com, December 2, 2014).
The living conditions for homeless people continuously deteriorated; the income and property gaps caused by distribution inequality continued to enlarge; ordinary people’s rights of health and education could not be well ensured as relative resources were more frequently used to serve the rich.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives overwhelmingly targeted racial and ethnic minorities as it expanded its use of controversial drug sting operations. At least 91 percent of the people agents have locked up using those stings were racial or ethnic minorities, and nearly all were either black or Hispanic (www.usatoday.com, July, 20, 2014).
Child laborers were engaged in dangerous works. American Labor Law allows juniors to work, as long as his or her parents consent and the work does not directly conflict with school hours. That means, it is perfectly legal for a 12-year-old to work 50 or 60 hours a week in tobacco fields. Based on interviews with 141 child tobacco workers, aged 7 to 17, in the country’s four largest tobacco-producing states: North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, nearly three-quarters of children interviewed reported feeling sick – with nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, difficulty in breathing, or other serious symptoms while working in tobacco fields. Many of these symptoms were consistent with acute nicotine poisoning (www.politico.com, September 16, 2014).
In the field of international human rights, the U.S. has long refused to approve some core human rights conventions of the United Nations and voted against some important UN human rights resolutions. More than that, the U.S. continued to go even further to violate human rights in other countries, including infringing on the privacy of citizens of other countries with the overseas monitoring project, killing large number of innocent civilians of other countries in drone strikes, and raping and killing locals by U.S. soldiers garrisoned overseas.
Read more damning examples here