Use-of-force policies in police departments in 20 of the largest cities in the US failed to meet even ”minimum standards” under international human rights guidelines, according to a report from the University of Chicago Law School.

The report from the law school’s International Human Rights Clinic, highlights American policing’s difficulty balancing power with maintaining basic human rights, and the chasm between law enforcement in the US and elsewhere.

Officers are too broadly given discretion for lethal force, effectively authorising “state-sanctioned violence” and “the exercise of arbitrary brute force, a common tool of tyrannical and despotic governments,” the report says.

Read more at The Independent