In July 17, 2014, African-American resident Eric Garner was choked to death when several white New York police officers were arresting him. Garner, unarmed, put his hands up during the process, saying he couldn't breathe many times, and then he was grabbed from behind in a chokehold which was banned, until he lost consciousness (edition.cnn.com, December 3, 2014). Darren Wilson, a white police officer, fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African-American, on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, a town in Missouri. The shootings had generated continued riots in the town (The New York Times, November 25, 2014). After the grand jury of both Missouri and New York decided to bring no charges against the white police officer, massive protests broke out in more than 170 cities (www.mirror.co.uk, November 25, 2014). The protests were cracked down by authorities, with police aggressively arresting citizens on the streets. Some residents in Ferguson were unlawfully arrested by police and were just trying to get home when they were picked up and taken to jail (www.reuters.com, December 2, 2014). Since August 2014, roughly 300 people, including local residents and activists as well as organizers and journalists who traveled to Ferguson, had been arrested amid the protests (The Chicago Tribune, December 1, 2014). "Ferguson incident" was a bitter result of the excessive use of force by police in law enforcement. New York Daily News reported on October 8, 2014, that two police officers beat a 16-year-old teenager Karhreem Tribble with grips of fire arms. Several of the teenager's teeth were broken and his mouth was swollen. In another report the next day, the paper said a police officer swiped 1,300 dollars from a man during a stop-and-frisk. When the man and his sister complained and tried to get his badge number, the officer then pepper-sprayed him and his sister. What was more disturbing, the other officer was just standing around watching. On November 23, 2014, police in the U.S. city of Cleveland, Ohio, shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who was in a playground waving around what turned out to be a replica gun (www.foxnews.com, November 23, 2014 ).

Security authorities were illegally eavesdropping, infringing on citizens' privacy. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal privacy watchdog, concluded that the National Security Agency's (NSA) program to bulk phone call records was illegal (The New York Times, January 23, 2014). The Huffington Post reported on February 27, 2014 that U.S. District Judge William Martini dismissed a lawsuit brought by eight Muslims, affirming the New York Police Department's right to spy on Muslim communities in New Jersey, drawing fire from several human rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (www.huffingtonpost.com, February 27, 2014). The Prism gate continued to reveal that American law firm was monitored by the NSA while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. On July 16, 2014, Navi Pillay, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the mass surveillance programs and related polices by some states were not transparent, creating an interference with privacy at a press conference on the right to privacy in the digital age (www.ohchr.org, July 16, 2014). According to Pillay, coercing private providers into offering massive personal information and data about customers without their noticing or consent was against rules set in documents including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Prisons in the U.S. were crowded and violence and deaths there were increasing. According to a report titled "Prisoners in 2013" by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. state and federal correctional facilities held an estimated 1,574,700 prisoners on December 31, 2013, an increase of 4,300 prisoners from yearend 2012 (www.bjs.gov, September 16, 2014). In some places, prisons resorted to early releases because of the surge in prisoners. Across California, more than 13,500 inmates were being released early each month to relieve crowding in local jails - a 34 percent increase over the last three years. In Los Angeles County, with a quarter of California's jail population, male inmates often were released after serving as little as 10 percent of their sentences and female prisoners after 5 percent (The Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2014). Due to lax management, violence in prisons was occurring frequently. In 2012, 4,309 inmates died while in the custody of local jails or state prisons (www.bjs.gov, October 9, 2014). The number of deaths in local jails increased, from 889 in 2011 to 958 in 2012. In Rikers Island, a vast New York City jail complex, the use of force by correction officers jumped nearly 240 percent over the last decade since 2004 (The New York Times, March 19, 2014). In the Julia Tutwiler Prison in Alabama, there was a large amount of complaints about the sex abuse and harassment involving guards and supervisors. However, state investigators time and again classified the complaints as unfounded or unsubstantiated and often recommended that the matters be closed without further action (The Washington Post, October 6, 2014).