&gt;<i>For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved.</i><p>I can&#x27;t understand this &quot;surely this doesn&#x27;t happen&quot; mentality of a lot of Americans in general in such cases. I mean, I can understand wanting to see hard proof for a particular case (and to name names), but to think that these things do not happen or are not widespread seems delusional to me, like believing we live in Sesame Street kind of society.<p>Maybe because in other parts of the world the general culture doesn&#x27;t include &quot;trusting authority&quot; as some default -- which used to be the case in the US too, for blacks, 60s students etc, but somehow got lost for the middle class. For a place with the biggest incarceration rate in the world, that seems bizarre.<p>This goes beyond police abuse too. While they would still condemn it, nobody would bat an eye in disbelief for something like &quot;watergate&quot; for example in other parts of the world. Of course those things happen -- in a place like Italy or France for example, they&#x27;ve seen the same things going on tons of times. But even when remember people like Hoover, they tend to think it was some isolated incident, due to a bad person, etc (the &quot;few bad apples&quot; theory as opposed to systemic issues).