Police murders of African Americans and protests against these continue apace – with only cursory media attention.

In Milwaukee, police shot and killed Sylville Smith on 13 August. As news of the murder became known, angry crowds confronted the police and began to fight back, throwing rocks, setting cop cars on fire and burning down some businesses in a spontaneous mass uprising.

After the violence subsided, the leader of a Black church led a peaceful march of 100 people to the police station. The crowd raised their arms in the air in the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” gesture that has been a feature of many protests.

Some cops at the station, including on the roof, responded by placing their hands on their guns as the crowd approached. Others “jumped out of cars with rifles and billy clubs”, said the church deacon who led the march. “We just wanted to get our point across. We just want peace. Why do they always have to react by going to the gun first?”

The police justified the shooting in a press conference, saying that Smith had a criminal record. They also claimed to have a video of Smith threatening them with a gun, but refuse to release it to the public.

In July, Chicago cops killed an unarmed Black teenager, Paul O’Neal. In this case the authorities did release a partial video taken by police body cameras. The murder was not filmed, the cops claim, because the officer who did the shooting didn’t have his camera turned on.

The video showed O’Neal lying face down in a growing pool of blood surrounded by other officers, who then handcuff him and search his belongings as he continues bleeding. He died later in hospital. He was shot in the back, according to the medical examiner.

At the scene, officers can be overheard concocting stories about how they were attacked. One can be heard cursing and complaining: “I’m going to be on a desk for 30 goddamn days now. Mother fucker!”

His expectation of a slap on the wrist for murder is typical throughout the US; almost all police involved in such shootings, including those that have been caught on video and are well known, are barely punished – if at all.

In the United States, police are not subject to the same laws as civilians when it comes to the use of force. Police departments establish their own rules, which can vary from city to city. One thing these policies have in common is that cops may shoot to kill if they believe that they are threatened.

The Supreme Court has upheld this standard.

This defence has been used successfully in many cases where the cop says he thought that a suspect was reaching for a gun. It often turns out there was no gun, and the victim was reaching for identification as requested by the police.

Since any cop can claim he or she felt threatened, and it is impossible to know what they believed, it is extremely difficult to prove otherwise. In the case of African American victims, Black witnesses are dismissed as biased.

This policy is only one aspect of the legal system’s excusing of police murder. The 2015 case of Freddie Gray is indicative. Baltimore police attacked him because, they claimed, he looked at them the wrong way. He was beaten, arrested and put in a van for transport to the police station. Upon arrival he was found dead.

An uprising similar to those in Ferguson in 2014 and Milwaukee recently erupted in the city. Frightened by the violence, authorities brought charges against the group of officers. A trial of one of the perpetrators resulted in a hung jury. Two of the remaining cops then opted for trials by judge. They both were found not guilty, and charges against the rest were dropped because it was clear there would be no convictions.

The police admit that Gray died at the hands of the cops in the police van. But none are found responsible. A peculiar but typical form of “justice”.

As a result of the Gray case, the federal Department of Justice investigated the Baltimore Police Department. Its recently released report was, in the words of the New York Times, a “scathing” indictment of the systematic police repression of Blacks. The report demolishes the myth that police oppression of African Americans reflects the actions of only a few “bad apples”.

On the contrary, the DOJ report found the whole department engaged in systematic repression – it is policy. Is it just one police department that operates this way? Not according to the report, which found that cities and towns across the country experience the same thing.

Another myth is that the situation can be resolved by recruiting more Black police officers. It is true that having all white or mostly white departments exacerbates racist treatment. But the Baltimore police are majority Black. All police are trained and disciplined by the police culture to carry out this policy. Any who object, white or Black, are ostracised and, if they persist, are ejected.

The report blames the pervasive use of “zero tolerance” policing. This is the policy of going after small “crimes” – such as spitting on the sidewalk, public drinking, begging, etc. –ostensibly to prevent bigger crimes. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that this harassment is aimed at crime prevention.

The report avoids the question of why this policy was adopted and applied to Blacks (and other minorities) almost exclusively. For example, in New York from 2008 to 2010, eight citations for riding bicycles on the sidewalk were issued in Park Slope, a predominately white neighbourhood, while in nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant, predominantly Black and Latino, 2,050 were issued.

The report doesn’t look at the underlying reality that predates “zero tolerance” – the systematic oppression of Blacks that has been part and parcel of the development of United States capitalism from colonial times to the present.

While the Department of Justice report is important for what it exposes, the department does nothing to bring the police perpetrators to justice.