I wondered aloud in a recent blog post how young people in the USA get their hands on high-caliber weapons, often with tragic consequences of innocent people getting killed. But I could just as well ask the same thing about police forces throughout the United States.

Ferguson, Missouri immediately comes to mind, of course, and the shooting death by police of 18-year-old Michael Brown. But contrary to what the apologists might say, we have seen this tragic scenario play out many times over the years in the United States of America, and it goes something like this:

White police officers shoot and kill an unarmed Black man. Police contend they were being violently attacked and acted purely in self-defense. Family demands an investigation. Community anger erupts. A respected national Black “civil rights” leader is called in to help calm things down. An independent investigation is promised. The investigation (if there is one) absolves police of homicide. Witnesses to the killing are ignored or have their credibility attacked. Media editorials defend and praise the actions of police for having done their job from the beginning. A family and a community are left to grieve over the loss of an innocent life. End of story...until the very same kind of incident happens in some other American city with equally tragic results again and again and again.

What will it take to stop this cycle of racist police violence and legal injustice against African American men and women in the United States? I do not claim to have all the answers. But at the very least, we need major changes in The System from top to bottom, for this problem is not merely a series of isolated incidents of police brutality. The problem is systemic, and the system is corrupt to the core.

It is not too much of a reach, given the course of U.S. history, to call the policing of American streets and the legal justice system of the USA as something akin to the apartheid system formerly found in South Africa. People of color in the U.S. may not have to carry a passbook that controls their every movement, as was the case in South Africa, but that does not stop African American citizens in their own communities from being singled out, questioned, detained, arrested, beaten or even killed in police custody for no other crime than being Black.

In South Africa, all politico-economic power over Black communities rested with institutions of White authority, just as if you were living in an occupied territory within your own country. Today, we see this same kind of system in more than a few cities throughout the United States. (A decent story here on the how that kind of authority came to exist in the case of Ferguson, Missouri.)

But while South Africa, in its transition to a democratic system 20 years ago, has made substantial efforts in dealing with those problems of racial division, American-style apartheid is very much still with us.

And it’s no longer a matter of what we used to call a “police state” in Black communities across the U.S. Now we see police forces in Ferguson and elsewhere armed to the teeth with military-grade equipment (courtesy of the Pentagon) and viewing themselves as standing on the frontlines of the so-called “war on terrorism”. What used to be a police state has now become the combined weight of a police-military-national security state that is falling on Black communities and other communities of color and economic deprivation.

More civilian control over police forces can be one answer to American apartheid, as some propose, but that won’t solve it all. More monitoring cameras attached to police cars and to police uniforms themselves may help, but such digital recordings can also be manipulated. Having the news media and activist groups such as Amnesty International converge on the scene of social unrest (as they did in Ferguson) is fine, but what happens when all those outside witnesses decide to leave?

Protests and demonstrations against police abuse of power are surely needed to call attention to a specific killing at the hands of some racist police officer(s), but sooner or later we will have to deal with the American apartheid system as the root cause rather than as just a symptom.

The police killing in Ferguson, Missouri can happen, and does happen, in any American city at any time. And it will continue to happen until we shake up The System from top to bottom, at all levels of the courts and law enforcement and public policy. Just as in South Africa under apartheid, resistance and constant vigilance under American-style apartheid is needed — from all sides and at all levels, from the local to the national to the international level. People must keep on speaking up, standing up and acting up in the name of greater change.

Corrupt systems are never changed overnight, and they never voluntarily change themselves. Apartheid in South Africa has shown us that much. Yet if South Africa can substantially come to terms with its own brand of racial oppression, then so must the country that proclaims itself to be the bastion of liberty and democracy in the world. That’s you, America.