Most blacks in US face police brutality

Two-thirds of young blacks and 4 in 10 Latinos in the US say that they or someone they know has experienced police violence or harassment by law enforcement officers, according to a new poll.

The GenForward poll found that two-thirds of young African Americans and about half of the Hispanics said they had personally experienced violence or harassment at the hands of the police.

About 60 percent of those surveyed also considered the killings of minorities as an extremely or very serious problem.

Those survey results come amid renewed anger over the fatal shooting of several young African American men by police around the country.

On July 5, Alton Sterling was fatally shot during a struggle with officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile was killed the following day by an officer in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Their deaths triggered revenge attacks against police by two black US military veterans. Five officers were shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, on July 7 and three were ambushed and fatally shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 17.

Over 55,000 people in the United States were either killed or wounded by police in just one year, according to a recent study.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed British medical journal Injury Prevention, found that most of the deaths were from fatal firearm wounds or excessive use of taser devices.

Some 1,063 people were either fatally shot or tasered to death by police in 2012, out of an estimated 12.3 million stops and arrests, the study noted.