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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
The Coroner's Silence: How the State Uses Death Records to Hide Police Violence w/ Prof. Terence Keel (G&R 469)
00:55:07
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- [00:01]
Professor Terence Keel
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics.
- [00:10]
Bob Bozanko
Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
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Scott Parkin
Welcome to the Silkies Move Sounds of Granny Red podcast. I'm your co host Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California. And as always, I am joined by
- [00:23]
Bob Bozanko
Bob Bozanko in Niles, Ohio.
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Scott Parkin
And today we're going to be. We're talking about a very interesting topic. We're talking with Professor Terence Keel, who is a professor of human biology, society and African American Studies at ucla. We're going to be talking about his latest book, which is the Coroner's Silence, I Almost Said the Corridor, the Coroner's Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. It's a book that looks at the systematic concealment of state sanctioned violence through death investigations, which is, It's a great topic. It's a great book. Professor Keel, welcome to the Green and Red Podcast.
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Professor Terence Keel
Pleasure being here. Thank you for having me.
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Scott Parkin
And maybe we could just start off with. Why don't you tell us a little bit how you came to this topic. I mean, it's a great topic.
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Professor Terence Keel
It's.
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Scott Parkin
We were just talking about before you came on and it's like something makes a lot of sense and it kind of fits in with our worldview, but it's also things, it's also something that we've never really thought about it and depth. So could you maybe talk about how you came to this topic about coroners and the coroner's silence?
- [01:25]
Professor Terence Keel
Sure, yeah. You know, I, I often get asked this question and I usually say, well, you know, it was the, the death of George Floyd, which is true. But I think it was more than that. I think, you know, George Floyd's death, if you remember those moments from 2020, which sometimes feel like it was an entirely different generation ago, it wasn't just George Floyd. It was Breonna Taylor, it was Freddie Gray, it was Sandra Bland, it was Philando Castillo. It was all of these people who were dying in this most gruesome, violent public way. And there wasn't any justice around these cases. And there was really a lack of clarity about what happens when people die in police custody. And I think the George Floyd case for many became an inspiration for a kind of reckoning around police violence because we all saw what happened. We all saw his public murder. But the medical examiner could still write a record that would say, well, yeah, it was homicide, but cardiopulmonary arrest complicated law enforcement to do, although that's a literal Quote from the autopsy, meaning Floyd had a bad heart. His heart made it difficult for police to arrest him, so they had to use more force. That's what ultimately killed him, his bad heart. And I wondered, how many more cases like this are there? How many more times have people died in police custody, in darkness, without cameras, without witnesses? And the medical examiner wrote a death record that blamed the victim for their own perishing. And when I began to investigate that question, I was terrified by what I discovered. And I wanted to write a book about what's wrong with this system, how coroners and forensic investigators are failing us, and that they're a missing part of the puzzle for criminal justice reform. It's not just the police we need to be paying attention to. It's the people who are writing the death records. And those of us who really are kind of coming to this issue for the first time, we've got to catch up because family and communities have been dealing with this reality for decades.
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Bob Bozanko
You know, with police, we often use the term copaganda because like in pop culture, you know, and there's kind of an element here too.
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Professor Terence Keel
What?
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Bob Bozanko
Just kind of in general, because, you know, on TV you see the corners presented in kind of a neutral way. But what is the actual role of a corner? Whose side are they on?
- [03:47]
Professor Terence Keel
Oh, I think that framing of cop again is really right there. And it's something I'm thinking about since releasing the book. You know, there's the great Troy Duster, sociologist, science, who's written a lot about racism and eugenics and forensic science. He has this term called the CSI effect. What that essentially means is that, you know, the CSI television series, crime investigative drama, it presents forensic investigators as if they are these scientific experts who are only interested in truth. They stand independent of the law, they stand independent of police, they actually stand on the side of everyday people. You know, these are justice seeking folks. And if you look at the way the state laws are written, you might get that impression too. State laws say that there needs to be an independent, objective evaluation of a loss of life under mysterious or uncertain circumstances. And that's the job of the medical
- [04:42]
Scott Parkin
examiner, of the coroner.
- [04:44]
Professor Terence Keel
But the reality of these things are much more messy, much more complicated. Medical examiners are like everyone else. They are influenced by the reality in the society that we live in. And if that society is structured around racism, if it's structured around economic inequality, and if it's also structured around empowering law enforcement, dumping millions of dollars into law enforcement and policing, that is going to influence the kind of records that they write. And this is one of the first things that I had to confront as an author and a researcher and a scholar working with communities on this issue. My own bias about what the medical examiner is. Right. We're all socialized to think doctors take the Hippocratic oath, do no harm to everyday people. But when you read these records, there's a very different reality going on. And these death investigators are writing records that provide cover for police and protect the state against the people. And that's a problem.
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Bob Bozanko
You know, just to follow up quickly, one thing that really struck me is that the vast majority of states, if somebody dies in police custody, there's no requirement for an autopsy.
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Professor Terence Keel
It is shocking, isn't it? 43 states in this country do not require a mandatory autopsy when someone dies in law enforcement custody. So what that means is that the state legislator is giving discretion, discretionary power to the medical examiner to determine whether or not an autopsy is warranted or not. And in discovering cases, I discovered cases where medical examiners just fail to do an autopsy entirely. I write in the book about Daniel Pastryk, a 60 year old white man who was unhoused living in Pennsylvania in Allegheny county, and he goes to jail because he can't pay fines for loitering. When he's in jail, he has a health crisis. He cries out for help and support that he never gets it. Deputies find him unconscious on the jail cell floor. The medical examiner says that they did a death investigation, but what they really did is just look at the body, didn't do any internal organ examination, didn't do a toxicology report, and said that this person died of cardiovascular disease and illness, which is a very easy thing to say because when we die, two things are going to happen. Your heart's going to stop and your brain's going to stop. So technically speaking, everyone dies from heart failure eventually and everyone dies from brain failure eventually. But when people die in police custody, this is a different reality. These are people who are. Their freedom is taken away from the state. The state's responsible for them. And so it's a tragedy all around. And I think that we should not be just be giving discretionary power to medical examiners. The state law should be written in such a way that everyone who dies in custody, they should have a full autopsy.
- [07:34]
Scott Parkin
You know, you, you note that you were inspired to write this book by the death of John Horton iii, who was a young black man whose autopsy gave the impression that he took his own life. Could you talk a little bit more about that, because, you know, I mean, part of it is, is that, you know, it seems like everyone, lots of people who die in custody die by their own hand, right? Like, and, and there also seems to be a way in which, like coroner's cover for the state. But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your John Horton.
- [08:02]
Professor Terence Keel
You know, John Horton was a young 20 year old black man from Watts who goes to jail, really in the middle of a health crisis. He's experiencing some sort of health condition that the family can't quite figure out. They call for paramedics and police show up. And there's a sort of exchange between his mother, Helen Jones, who I have, you know, grown to work with and has really become an extension of my family in so many ways. Police say they're going to take him to the hospital and then take him to jail. It's unclear why they want to take him to jail, but they do and they throw him into solitary confinement right away. And he's in there for, you know, weeks, months, really. Can't get access to family, can't get access to his mother. He's not even showing up for court appearances. There are days that he's supposed to appear in front of the judge and he can't come out of his jail cell. And what later we learned, looking at his autopsy and his mother learned this is because he was being subjected to violence by the deputies. They were beating him up inside the jail cell. And when he finally dies, the sheriffs say that he hung himself from bed sheets that he supposedly tore with some sort of sharp object and suspended himself partially from the grate inside of his jail cell. But when his mother got his body inside the mortuary several days later, which by the way, they didn't allow the mother to see, they didn't allow Helen to see his body after he died. Right away, the bridge of his nose, there was a clear recent flesh wound to the bridge of his nose appeared to be broken. There was abrasions all over his face. There was recent blunt force trauma to his back. There was blood in his mouth. And when she got photos that were taken from the scene, there were blood on his clothes. He clearly had been beaten to death. There was a flesh wound around his wrist which looked like he had been handcuffed and was, was struggling while he was being beaten. And he was struggling so much that it ripped open a flesh wound around his wrist. And so the mother, Helen, challenged the medical examiner and said, this doesn't make sense. How could my son have killed himself with all these injuries, and he was in solitary confinement. And if it wasn't for her pushing, the medical examiner would not have changed the death classification from suicide to undetermined because there were so much discrepancies in this record record. And John, you know, was fortunate enough to have family and community to sort of play watch, you know, to make sure that the death record was accurate. But there are so many people who are dying under these conditions that don't have a mother like Helen Jones. And Helen had been working and trying to gather family and other stories much like her own before I met her. She had been doing this for 10 years. And so I had the privilege of meeting her. And from there we developed a really powerful partnership where she taught me how to read death records and to read them in such a way that you can pull a story out of a record that the record doesn't want you to tell. These records are written in ways to hide, to obscure, to downplay. And her experience with this system and these death records was just a powerful insight that I, as an academic researcher alone couldn't have come to because I didn't experience the violence of the system firsthand. She did. And so John's death really was a. Was a powerful inspiration for all the work that's come since then. And we're grateful for people like Helen Jones and so many others who are fighting for truth.
- [11:22]
Bob Bozanko
Is, is it common for, like, a family to kind of follow up on this official report? It seems like it would require, you know, some. Some involvement, some knowledge of the system, some resources. Is this what Colin Kaepernick is doing
- [11:35]
Professor Terence Keel
now to questions there? Tragically, Robert, you know, much depends on what state you're in. Yeah, if you're in a state like California and you're in Los Angeles and Oakland, where there is a long noted history of police violence, communities suffering with people dying in police custody, and there's a greater awareness around distrusting the state when it comes to telling you stories about why your brother, sister, father died in police custody there, you're going to find families trying to push back and get better answers. But if you have a loved one who dies in, let's say, Pennsylvania, and the autopsy record is $500 to get this record. And if you're working class, working poor, unemployed, you got a tough decision to make. Am I going to pay $500 per record to figure out what's going on with my lost loved one, or am I going to spend that money on burial? And tragically, families are Making decisions to have closure rather than actually push back. And so there's a. You know, we. Part of the motivation for the book is to help connect communities around the country to. To a reality that we're all sharing and that we should have a greater level of suspicion about the records that are written for our loved ones and family members who are dying in police custody. And I think now we're in a moment of reckoning because we're watching, you know, on television, police violence, whether that's violence from law enforcement or ice, and we're seeing how the narratives the state can create to cover up and make it seem like these people got what they deserve. You know, that Renee Goode was threatening an ICE officer and therefore he had to protect himself, even though the video footage tells something entirely different. I think we're in a moment now where we can look at what's going on with police and law enforcement with a bit more scrutiny. But I do think there's a larger issue here. And, you know, the Know youw Rights Campaign, which I'm very familiar with and have been in conversation and consulted with them for the last six years, they're trying to support families who don't have the resources to do a secondary autopsy to figure out what's going on. But they're, you know, they're one organization. And this is a crisis that's happening every day. Every day, someone, at least three people, technically, really it's five people are dying in police custody, but we're really only going to know the names of three of these people. And so that's the magnitude of the problem. And we need government support. But more than that, we need the people to kind of pull together to put to fight this problem.
- [14:04]
Scott Parkin
It also seems like with Renee Good and Alex Preddy, that was caught on video, right? Like there were three or five different cameras on each of their murders by ice, whereas with you do with the book and what a lot of this is about is people who died in custody where there's, you know, very, very likely not video. Right. Or they erase it. Right. And so I'm wondering what the, you know, what are some of the challenges with that, plus, plus the economic $500 for an autopsy report and things like that. What are some of the challenges of piecing this together?
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Professor Terence Keel
So, you know, Scott, it's a great question because, you know, as I mentioned in the book, a lot depends on what state you live in, because not every state allows public access to death records. And, you know, when you look across the country, there's a. There's several states that don't allow the public to get access to these documents. So there aren't any sort of collective reckoning around what's going on when people are dying in custody. There's around 20 states where autopsies are not public record. 14 states put death records on the public record, but there's another 11 that allow you to get access, but that access can be restricted. So just as an example, California is an open record state. Any one of us could FOIA request. You could do an Alameda, Alameda County. I can do it here in LA for the death record of someone. The problem though is that the state law allows the sheriff to put any death record on security hold. They file a request to the medical examiner and the medical examiner has to acknowledge that request. They could either choose to entertain it or they could deny it. But what historically has happened because of the embeddedness of the coroner, the medical examiner, the sheriff's office, which we can get into in a little bit, they've just been rubber stamping these requests. And so even in an open record, progressive blue state like California, when you look at death record access, it's very hard to figure out which records get put on security hold for how long and what happens when they get taken off. And so even if you get the record, there are still other things that can happen. The medical examiner can redact sections of the record. We discovered this firsthand when we first started doing our investigations in Los Angeles. We were getting records from the medical examiner with really not that much complication. In fact, very few people were requesting records for them, so they were somewhat willing to give it to us. But then when we started releasing reports about what we found, things shifted. They started giving us records where they were redacting sections of the records. They were sort of not giving us all the files. And they were doing this because we were paying attention. There was a level of scrutiny that they were unused to and they were trying to cover up the record. And so it's incredibly difficult to get access to this information. And I think it all stems from, just to put this as a bow on this, in 2000, Congress passed the Death and Custody Reporting act, which requires law enforcement to report the names of the people that they kill. But just think about that. The people who are ending our lives are also the ones that are supposed to be responsible for telling on themselves and reporting about this. There's an inherent conflict of interest here, and we see that play out in the number of cases that don't get reported, that get misclassified, that police undercount. I mean, there's been tons of studies done on this. We've done our own version of this. And so it's a system that relies on police to report on the cases that they're responsible for killing people. And it's a system that isn't giving us the information we need.
- [17:36]
Bob Bozanko
And I should have actually started with this. But how does, how do we pick corners? How do coroners become coroners? Are they elected? Are they appointed?
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Scott Parkin
To whom?
- [17:44]
Bob Bozanko
Are they, you know, accountable?
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Professor Terence Keel
Great question.
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Bob Bozanko
It's kind of. It's not like a neutral position from the start.
- [17:51]
Professor Terence Keel
You know, the coroner's office is one of the oldest democratic institutions in American history. It was one of the offices that was brought over from English law. So English common law founded what they called Crowners. And their job was to work for the crown of England. And their job was to make sure that there were any debts or outstanding bills that someone owed to the crown after they died, they made sure those assets were returned. So we brought crowners here to the American colonies because this was a British colony after American independence, the crowners became the coroner. And there was a sort of clear linguistic transition. And in the new role of the coroner, their job was really kind of this dramatically democratic experiment where the coroner would round up 12 free white citizens, because those are the people who counted the citizens at the time. And they would determine what happened before, during and after someone died under mysterious circumstances.
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Scott Parkin
Right.
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Professor Terence Keel
And then they would determine who was accountable, what charges were to be pressed. And then the coroner would take that information and go to a sheriff and say, these 12 citizens determined that John Doe was responsible for killing this person. Arrest them. But what happens is after 1865, as we expand the democratic franchise to formerly enslaved black folks and other non whites, the institution of a coroner gets more contracted. And there are some things that are happening within our larger political landscape that are restricting access to the voting booth, access to democratic institutions, even though the letter of the law allowed the constitution to apply to everyone. So that's happening. And then also coroners become more professionalized as doctors and physicians by the end of the 19th century, going into the 20th century. And what that does is it turns coroners from what used to be a position where they had to be elected to someone that was appointed and they were appointed by local government. Where we are now is we have a hodgepodge of laws where it depends on what state you're in. So in California, coroners and medical examiners Both exist in the state. Coroner doesn't have to be a physician. And actually, in many states, like Alameda, for example, Alameda county, the sheriff is the coroner. In Alameda county, what that means is that they oversee death investigations of the people that they kill. They outsource the examination of the death to a physician. But in Los Angeles, the medical examiner is appointed by the board of supervisors, and they can be in those roles indefinitely. But if you go to Louisiana, coroners have to run for office. They're elected by a local voting constituency. But if you go to New York, the medical examiner is appointed by local government. So that every state does things very differently. And I think that contributes to the problem because we have officials in these roles and the laws aren't entirely consistent and uniform. So whenever you want to figure out what's going on with this system, you get different answers because each bureaucracy is functioning differently. And so that's where we are by the letter of the law. They're supposed to be independent, nonpartisan investigators and to death. But in reality, they are deeply embedded with police and law enforcement and again, write records that often betray the public.
- [21:09]
Scott Parkin
You know, you, you say that there. You talk about how there's. There's five categories of death, and I think generally it's not just in custody, which is like homicide, suicide, accidental, natural and determined.
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Professor Terence Keel
That's right.
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Scott Parkin
And you know, where a lot of the disparity happens is that, you know, except for homicide, there's a lot of them that natural or accidental or suicide, which are, which are like, were likely or. Or later proven to be homicide. I'm wondering what the sort of like, stats are that are able to be proven or at least suspected of things that were homicide in custody of homicides versus like, suicide or natural causes.
- [21:50]
Professor Terence Keel
Yeah, you know, it's a great question. So what I did for this book is a few things at the national level. It's very difficult to get national data around how each death is being classified. Partially. That has to do with the fact that the data that's released by local police departments and sheriff's departments, there are no standards for that data. And this has been something that I document in the book. And it's a long standing problem. The Bureau of Justice Statistics under the DOJ mandates police report who they kill, but it doesn't mandate what information they release. So what that means is that you might get police departments that'll give you the name, race, age and gender, but won't provide the manner of death. They might provide the manner of death, but Then might redact the name or the case file. So it's difficult to validate what's going on there. So where the. What we know for sure is that when law enforcement kill people with their guns, you know, 99% of the time that's going to be classified as a homicide because it's just clearly the case. There are always exceptions where things get more tricky and complicated is when someone dies in police custody and a firearm is not involved. So that could be from tasers or pepper spray. It could be from, you know, use of force. It could also be from police using their cars, which is something that I found was really surprising. When you look at the. How police are killing us, at the very top are guns. But number two is actually vehicles, cops killing people by chasing and, you know, causing them to crash, or they're killing bystanders while they're trying to chase someone. And so when you look more deeply at these more local cases where the medical examiner is trying to figure out what's going on and a gun isn't involved, that's where bias comes in. Because the medical examiner has to interpret what happened to the body and what, what happens when someone dies in police custody? They send a forensic investigator on the scene and the investigator interviews police and they ask police what happened, what's going on, why did you pursue this person? And so the police tell them information. That information goes into a narrative. That narrative then gets given to the medical examiner or the coroner when they're doing their investigation on the autopsy. And that narrative orients their attention to certain things and not others. And so they come to conclusions that obviously can favor police. And one very common conclusion is that this person died of natural causes. And that carries the least amount of responsibility and burden for police and law enforcement. What I discovered is that an sort of overwhelming number of African Americans, when they die in police custody and a gun is not involved, many of those deaths are classified as a natural death. And so what we're finding is that that actually doesn't also translate for white Americans. For white Americans, natural deaths are not nearly as frequent. Homicide is often more prevalent. In those cases, undetermined is also pretty prominent. But for black Americans, natural death is pretty high. And in those cases, very similar to George Floyd, it's turning to the pre existing condition, drug use. Something is wrong with the person's biology and that is the reason why they're perishing, not the actual violence of police
- [25:02]
Bob Bozanko
you talked about. Is it Andres Cordado who I believe there's a hearing right after the autopsy, and they bring in a retired justice. And what struck me about that is she kept framing things very narrowly, like, I can't talk about this, or we can't really discuss this. And how much is just kind of the way the system is set up, the way the rules of the process is set up, makes it even harder than to kind of really get at the root of what causes these deaths.
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Scott Parkin
Yeah.
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Professor Terence Keel
So the case of Andres Gorado was another young 20 year old Latino who was in Los Angeles. From what we know, he was doing security at a local auto bottle shop. Police pull up, they spook him. He runs, they chase him down, they gun him down. The autopsies show clear bullet trajectories from his back going out of his chest. So he clearly had his back turned. Police story says something different. Police say that he turned towards them, they were threatened, so they shot him. What they do is they hold an inquest. So when I was narrating a little bit earlier, 18th century, 17th century, if someone died in the mysterious circumstances, the coroner would hold an inquest where they would pull a jury, where they would pull together seven, you know, 12 free white citizens to determine what happened. In our modern times, the inquest has been something that has not been used pretty regularly. And in Los Angeles, when they held the inquest For Guardardo in 2021, it had been the first time they had done one since the 1990s. And so they stopped doing these inquests. But when you look at the way the laws are written for the inquest now, they are not determining who's accountable. They're not determining what charges are to be brought against police. What they are doing for these public inquests is that they are determining if police behaved consistent with the rules and norms of law enforcement and if the medical examiner did an investigation that was consistent with the rules and norms according to the state legislature. So there are no questions from the family if they're public, but no one from the public could ask the question. I was there for the Guardo inquest. It was during COVID People were wearing masks. Some people were online. There was a limited number of us inside the building. And it was a very sterile experience. I read about it as sort of.
- [27:17]
Scott Parkin
It was like a.
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Professor Terence Keel
It was like a kind of political pageantry where the performance of democracy was happening, but the substance wasn't there. There were no clear answers provided in that inquest. And it was an incredibly frustrating, difficult, and disappointing experience for all of us in the room because the family didn't get justice in this inquest.
- [27:37]
Scott Parkin
And how often do inquest?
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Professor Terence Keel
Well, what's interesting is that the inquest, technically the medical examiner here in Los Angeles and other places, they usually have the discretion to hold an inquest. This isn't true in all. In all states. I show a diagram in the book. What number of what states allow for a medical examiner to actually hold an inquest. Not all 50 do. But in California, it's to the discretion of the medical examiner to hold an inquest. But what that means in real time, community organizations putting pressure on the medical examiner is what allow for the Guardo case to happen because it was right after George Floyd, he died accident in 2020. And it took time for community to organize and push and pressure the medical examiner to hold this inquest. But that's not how the system should work. If we have the inquest, it should be for every single case. It shouldn't be based on how much, how much you can mobilize and put pressure to put shame as a, as a tool for justice. You know, this should be a system that should be equal and fair for everyone. And so it's not nearly as frequent as community wants. But even when it does happen again, the Guardado case showed us it's not always satisfying. And what, what communities really want are a public discussion of police being accountable for this death, not something that sort of allows the death and the questions around the death to go unanswered.
- [29:02]
Bob Bozanko
At one point, you talked briefly about Barack Obama's role, I think was after the Skip Gates incident or. And he, I think was kind of similar to Trayvon Martin, where he initially comes out and it seems to be very critical of this, but then kind of backtracks. How important is that kind of national dialogue, whether it be from a president or a senator or a governor? It seems like that's putting like intense pressure on the system to keep doing things the way they've been doing it.
- [29:26]
Professor Terence Keel
Great question. You know, I think that the executive branch has a, has a role to play for setting the tone for how our criminal justice system will work. What, what will be the bar for holding police accountable? I think that, that there is a role for the federal, at the federal level to deal with these issues. But I think the reality is more complicated because on the ground, it's the, it's the state legislator that determines how the medical examiner or coroner operates. And it's Minneapolis.
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Bob Bozanko
Right?
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Professor Terence Keel
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So it's really, it's really about. At the, it's the state level, which I think is in some ways, good, because we know federal government moves very slowly and it's not always effective. It can play a role in putting pressure and say, look, there will be financial consequences if you do not report the names of the people that dying in police custody. I mean, I think what the Trump administration is showing us, that you can use a bully pulpit and you can, say, threaten to remove federal funds to get whatever agenda you want. Why can't there be a progressive version of this where the federal branch is saying, look, these police departments that are underreporting or not reporting, we're going to withhold federal resources and funds if you don't do this? DCRA Death and Custody Reporting act supposedly does this, but it doesn't have a lot of bite, just like the EPA doesn't have a lot of bite. I think we need some federal pressure that will, I think, create greater incentives for DAs, for governors, for mayors to put pressure on local policing and law enforcement to comply with these laws. So there needs to be a kind of combination of things. But I think truly none of this stuff moves unless the people push and demand for it, because elected officials are going to continue doing business as usual, and they're going to continue to turn to the people who put money into their campaigns and support their work and community until we sort of put pressure on these elected officials to hold them accountable. I don't think the system actually reforms itself. We have to demand it.
- [31:24]
Bob Bozanko
Well, along those lines, like, and this is all recent, so it's kind of speculative, but, I mean, Trump's just refusing to do investigations into, into these killings in Minneapolis, and you're seeing a ton of outrage about that. And I'm not sure it's not really Trump centered. But is that, is there a momentum there that. Where people can start looking into this differently and saying, hey, this. This system needs to be, like, thrown out and replaced?
- [31:49]
Professor Terence Keel
I think so. I think that the connections between, let's say, the deaths that are happening as a result of people being arrested for ICE and the deaths that have been happening for people who die in police custody, we're talking about similar systems where systems of policing and law enforcement systems, where in both cases, the medical examiner is doing the death investigation for Renee Good and Alex Brady, because that death took place in the jurisdiction of, you know, where they work. And again, we're dealing with, you know, Minnesota, again, where there was a lot of activism and momentum following George Floyd's death. So, yes, I think you're right. This is the moment to be thinking again about something that happened in 2020 and how the same system is now in play. Police violence, law enforcement, in an effort to kind of COVID up and downplay what's going on. And even worse, the president saying that I'm not really going to put pressure on local officials to do anything about this. I think that's, that's equally troubling. But it sends a signal, well, if the executive branch isn't doing something, we have to, because this democracy is going to be accountable to us. And if you got that, if you've got an assembly member or district member or an elected official who's working in a jurisdiction where people are dying in custody and nothing's being done about it, you can write that Senator. You got to put pressure on an elected official. Hey, what are you saying? What are you doing about isolation deaths? What are you doing about people dying in jail? What are you doing about people dying during arrests? That's where this changes.
- [33:20]
Bob Bozanko
Maybe we'll start seeing a protest at the coroner's office.
- [33:23]
Professor Terence Keel
Good. Yes, we've done that here in Los Angeles. We have, I think, and I think putting pressure, that's the, that is the. You see, you saw, you know, we started this conversation talking about propaganda. And I think that's right. I think forensic investigators, they are insulated because there's all this culture around them as, you know, law abiding folks, you know, people who are really interested in the truth. But the reality is very different. And I think that mythology needs to be shattered and we need to see in clear eyes what's actually going on. Right. They are obstructing justice, they're undermining the system that they supposedly represent and they actually participate in the deaths. Because if they write records that blame the victim and allow the real killers to go free, whose side are they really on? Right.
- [34:12]
Scott Parkin
You know, we just did a show back before the holidays about youth prisons and there's actually been a dramatic drop in the number of youth prisons in the country, like, even in like Louisiana and Texas and places like that. And a lot of that has been because of like community pressure and family pressure and things like that. And so, you know, this is another, you know, approach or strategy that could be taken on to sort of like kind of get more to the heart of some of this police accountability. Because it seems like the coroners actually also played this role in protecting these institutions. Right. It's like they're protecting the police institution. They're protecting the law and order. And, you know, we'd love to kind of cheat, call it Propaganda here, but like, you know, it's actually a very important approach which is needs to be more considered.
- [35:01]
Professor Terence Keel
I agree. You know, just think about it. You know, wouldn't we want the final record of our loved one or brother or father or sister to be right? I would. I want to live in a world where if, like some tragedy, someone that I love dies in police custody, I want the official to write that record and to tell the truth. And it is a such a difficult thing to realize that the record won't do that and often doesn't do that and instead does the opposite. It, you know, classifies these deaths in ways that make it difficult for you to even file lawsuits. Right. If the medical examiner says you died of natural causes, it's really hard for a legal team to push back against that and say police are the ones that really killed this person. But if they say, you know what, homicide, medical neglect, your loved one was in jail, they were in distress, no one bothered to take care of them, they died because of medical neglect. That gives family and community some real ammunition to put pressure against the police. I think that's what has to start happening. Medical examiners have everything in their disposal to tell the truth. They just have been aligned for decades, if not centuries to be thinking about law and order and not actually the public and police accountability. And this is the shift that needs to happen if this is going to change
- [36:21]
Bob Bozanko
about what I think in the past month, there was a case in San Antonio, somebody was in ice detention, and the coroner ruled it a homicide. And, you know, I don't follow it that closely, but my first response is, wow, you know, like, I'm surprised. Are there. I mean, I don't know what the issue was. It may have just been too obvious to overlook. But are there other, like, I don't want to call them rogue coroners, but are there the coroners who. Who have done that? Who will do that? Who will stand up to the police?
- [36:47]
Professor Terence Keel
Yeah. I've spoken with several coroners off the record who asked me off the record for this book. And the things that they told me would shock you, what they often say are a couple of things. They know how violent police are and they're aware of the fact that police are responsible for killing people during arrest. In jail, where they struggle is the fact that they don't feel that if they take the leap and try to write the record in the right way, that they're going to have the support of community and local organizations and that local organizations are going to see them as aligned with police. And my response was, well, of course they're going to see you aligned with police. If you're not actually doing your job right. Like, if you do your job and you. You show that you can be trusted to write these records in the right way, then you're going to get the support of the community. When you get pressure from police, and that often is what they tell me, that sheriffs will say to them, no one in this jail dies of homicide. No one dies of homicide in this jail. So that means that when people are dying, I need you to write a record that actually reflects what's really going on, which is these people are just sick. They're just old. They were going to die anyways. I've had coroners tell me this off the record, that they've been pressured by police to write records that favor law enforcement. And so many of these are still in their role. So they don't really feel comfortable coming out publicly saying this. I think the case that you're referencing in San Antonio shows us how much power a medical examiner can have. But it's not a coincidence that they did this because we're paying attention. Right? The scrutiny around ice, the scrutiny around detentions, the fact that they are disappearing people, children, are going into these centers. When the public pays attention, the system begins to function differently. When we don't pay attention, the system continues to operate in ways that betray the public. And my hope with this book is that if we just take a step back and look at all of the things that are preventing us from even paying attention, we can realize, oh, this is. There's some real corruption in the system. Not everyone can look at an autopsy. That's bizarre. Why is that the case? There are medical examiners where they can be in their roles indefinitely. That doesn't make any sense. Why is that the case? Death investigations can take place with police in the room. Why is that a system that works that way? Right. You mean to tell me that the very department that took this person's life can have a representative in the room when an official, objective record is being written? Like, those are the kinds of things that are just at the surface of what's wrong with the system? And then when you look more deeply, you know, one of the things that was really difficult for me to kind of just see is that before 2000, there was no federal mandate from Congress or the federal branch requiring police to report the names of the people they killed. So what that means is that all the police thefts that took place during the civil rights era. We're never going to know the names of those people. We're never going to. Names of the people who died in police custody at the zenith of racial lynching. So 1910, 1915, 1920. Never going to know. We're never going to know the names of people who were killed in police custody. You know, after 1865 or even after the end of reconstruction, the people will be lost forever in the record. Right. And so that tells us we only count the things that matter. We only count the things that count. And so the only reason why we even have Dickra is because there was a public demand for it. And that still needs to be the pressure we have to put on this system if we're going to get out of this mess. Can't reform a system if you don't know where it's broken. And you can only know if it's broken if you can see the records of where coroners and police are failing us.
- [40:29]
Bob Bozanko
You know, as I was reading this, I thought of a famous scene from the show the Wire where people watched it.
- [40:33]
Professor Terence Keel
The Wire? You said the Wire? Yeah, yeah.
- [40:36]
Bob Bozanko
You know, d' Angelo was killed and, you know, obviously murdered in a door that's like four feet high. And they rule it, I believe, a suicide.
- [40:43]
Scott Parkin
Right.
- [40:43]
Professor Terence Keel
And.
- [40:43]
Bob Bozanko
And when you watch it, you think, that's insane. That's preposterous. Nobody could get away with that. And then as I read this, it's like, oh, yeah, they get away with it every day. And is there any sense like that what they're doing is so over the top? They, they just don't care. There. There's no accountability.
- [40:58]
Professor Terence Keel
Look, if you can control the records, you can control who gets to see your work. Yeah, you create a culture where it's corrupt. You create a culture that is only accountable to the people that are paying your bills. So the elected officials that put them in the power and the law enforcement officers that you see daily who are bringing in bodies all the time, you know, I think that's where the, the, the corruption is happening. But again, we write these death investigators into the state law for a reason, to stand for the people. I mean, they literally write the records in the public's interest. That's what these records are supposed to be doing. So if they're not doing that, that means we have to start doing it. And, you know, we've been doing it in my lab, we've been doing it with our community partners all throughout the country, but we're a small outfit. Right. There's Like I said, five people are dying every day during arrests. It's impossible for us or the Kaepernick team to do this work. There needs to be much more investment into this problem. And I think it only starts when people realize one simple thing. If the cops are killing us and the coroners are lying about it, that means our criminal justice system is not keeping any of us safe. And you know, for your listeners, a statistic I think that they should know is that my Lab found between 2000 and 2020, 32,100 people died just during arrests over that 20 year period. To put that number into context, that's more than twice the number of people who have been executed officially in this country going back to 1608. So just think about it. In a 20 year period, just in the names that we know, cops have killed more than twice the number of all people executed in American history. That's just in 20 years. And when you look at the data of who's dying, right, they're male at the very high. Right. But white Americans are the largest demographic dying in police custody, which when I tell people that, it shouldn't be surprising because whiteness doesn't protect you from state violence. And people are seeing this now because of Renee Good and Alex Brady. But this has been historically the case. Law enforcement spares no one when it comes to police violence. It's black folks, it is Latinos. We have been disproportionately targeted by the system. We've been screaming it at the top of our lungs since the beginning. But also I think what we need to confront is the fact that this system is, is an unruly monster that will end the lives of anyone that is a perceived threat. And what counts as a threat these days is at the whim of local officials and government who are making decisions that are portraying the public. And I think this is, we have to see this as a democratic crisis threatening all of us.
- [43:40]
Bob Bozanko
Yeah, you have a, I thought, a very powerful line. You said dying in custody is the new capital punishment. And I never really thought of it that way. But you know, like, I've been, I've been aware of anti capital punishment groups forever there, there are quite a few even in Texas where I used to live. But you know, I never thought of like the corner being involved in this. And it's, it's really critical. I mean, it's far bigger, far bigger than, than capital punishment.
- [44:03]
Scott Parkin
Right.
- [44:03]
Bob Bozanko
Which is many. Even in Texas now, one or two a year. Like how do you, I mean, how have you in your own work, gone, tried to kind of let people know about this, you know, how big it is and, and how serious it is.
- [44:15]
Professor Terence Keel
You know, I'm traveling around the country, I'm having conversations about the book with community organizations and have worked with organizations in, in other states to help create laws that create better transparency. So we've done some work in Maryland, which I write about in the book. We're doing some work here in Los Angeles, obviously in other counties in the state. And the state, I think that there needs to be just a real reckoning with where this system is failing us. And one thing that I think is also important is that it's not just the police that are killing us in custody. When you look at the people who are dying, nonviolent offenders who are dying during arrest or who are dying in jail, many of these people were already failed by the evaporation of our social safety net. So these are people that are dealing with mental health issues, and there are not local resources because we've been pulling those resources away. These are people who are underemployed or who are unhoused, living in cities like Los Angeles or in the Bay Area where housing is absurd and it's very difficult to find. And these are people who are being arrested for loitering or public drunkenness, self medicating. These are people who want, who are dealing with a crisis and they need care. They need institutions from government to provide support in these crises. And they're not getting that. They're getting law enforcement who are not trained and who don't have the empathy to deal with someone who's dealing with a mental health crisis. So I write about military veterans with ptsd. Family members are saying, oh my God, we need support. Bring an EMT team here. And instead law enforcement come armed to the teeth. That only exacerbates the situation. And this person dies. And story after story after story are very similar where someone's in crisis, we meet that crisis with police and they die. And I think when you really think about that, what's really going on? We're using police to clean up the mess. When our social safety net is failing Americans and we're all feeling the squeeze of this, right? Like, how expensive is gas right now? How expensive are eggs? Like, how much longer can the kind of gutting out of the middle class, the squeezing of the working class, how much longer can that happen until all of us just become one day away from finding ourselves in police custody and potentially losing our lives? It's a reality this isn't something that is just a figment of our imagination. People are perishing already because we're failing them. And we're using police to clean up the mess,
- [46:46]
Scott Parkin
putting much more money into police budgets and ICE budgets and things like that to be able to continue to reinforce that.
- [46:52]
Professor Terence Keel
That's right. I mean, at the Prison Policy Institute just recently released some data showing that we're in the billions now in terms of the amount of increased investment in policing across the country over the last decade. Billion with a B. Right. Just imagine a fraction of that investment into mental health support, community support for people who are unhoused. We can't even get the Affordable Care act because we're still embattled around whether or not people should have the right to health and medicine. These are basic material needs that if you provide people with, they are a little bit less on the margin. They're living with a little bit more security. And I think that's what has to shift. Safety isn't just police. It's safety in mind and body and employment. Right. Like, I want to be able to live in a city where my neighbor doesn't have to make the terrible decision, do I pay for this hospital visit or do I pay for groceries? Right. And when you live in a society like that, precarity and danger is everywhere. And that's the kind of reality that we need to deal with. And you can't solve that with police because that's not the tool you need. You need material investment into people.
- [48:04]
Bob Bozanko
This is also bipartisan, right? Because, like, in 2020, you actually saw a significant, I think a majority of Americans supporting things like defunding police. And immediately, you know, not just like Biden, but like Bernie Sanders said, oh, no, no, we're never going to cut police budgets. And, you know, there's really. I mean, do you talk to anybody who has, like, kind of in that position, whether community groups or unions or church groups who. Who understand this? Because at the very top, you know, like, everybody, like, you know, Biden bragged about how he gave the police 300 billion extra dollars and how they funded ICE. And Hillary Clinton the other day is bragging about how efficient, you know, they were, you know, deporting people and apprehending people.
- [48:42]
Professor Terence Keel
Are there.
- [48:43]
Bob Bozanko
Are there folks out there who are actually fighting for this?
- [48:46]
Professor Terence Keel
Great question. Yes, we're fighting for this locally in Los Angeles. I think Mandani's transition, Mandani's team, they're trying to figure out this in New York. I think the discourse around defund the police is a bit mischaracterized because really what it means is earmarking resources that would have gone to law enforcement and instead go to housing or health care or employment opportunities or other things that keep people from having to come into contact with law enforcement to begin with. Right. It's about saying, yeah, invest in people. And guess what happens? People get a little bit better, they get a little more healthy. So the need to have lots of police on the street diminishes a little bit because people have safety in their lives. We in Los Angeles have been fighting for this for a really long time. And advocates got the county to do two things. Commit in paper at least closing Men's Central Jail, which the ACLU defined as a medieval dungeon because so many people were dying in there. But then also earmark millions of dollars for Care first programs where people are given all the kind of material resources they need to avoid going into jail. What the county has done is they've dragged their feet. They waited out the momentum from the George Floyd protests or when people stopped paying attention to then start doing things that they are actively doing now, which are giving money to the sheriff's department to build a state of the art jail. Right. Or giving money to the medical examiner's office even though the medical examiner continues to write records that favor police and law enforcement. And they're doing this because people aren't been paying attention to what's been going on. They are kind of undermining the effort to defund police and funding community and putting money right back into policing. And so we as a collective have to think differently about what safety and security looks like. That's the only way this is going to change. Because when we do that, then we start paying attention. Well, wait, what happened to that, you know, Care first program that you were going to spend millions of dollars to invest in people? Why is that going back into police and law enforcement and they continue to have people dying in custody? Like, those are the questions we have to be asking.
- [50:56]
Scott Parkin
I have only like really one question left. I don't know if Bob has anything else. We're kind of getting near the end of our time.
- [51:02]
Bob Bozanko
I've got a million to know. It's. This is fantastic. It's, you know, usually when we discuss one of these topics, you know, you know a little bit about it and you're familiar with it and you know, so when I read it, it's like, oh, this all makes sense. But I, it was just like so eye opening to, to, to read about this, you know, it's. You know, when you read, it's like, yeah, this fits this larger pattern, but still, you know, to. To actually study in it, to. To break it open. I mean, I. Not to diminish the abolition of the death penalty movement in any way, but this is like, so much, really bigger in. In terms of numbers than that. It's just a really great observation, great examination of what this is about. Usually not this full of glory for it, but it really is. It's a fantastic topic and a great treatment of it.
- [51:49]
Scott Parkin
Thank you. My last question is around the Biocritical Studies Lab, which I think it was inspired by John Horton's mother. But could you just tell us a little bit about that, something you founded, and it seems really relevant and important.
- [52:06]
Professor Terence Keel
Yeah, I founded the Biocritical studies lab in 2020 with. Working with Community and was really inspired by the work of Helen Jones, who, you know, really taught me how to read an autopsy, how to pull a story the autopsy doesn't want you to tell, how to read against the grain. We are a collection of student researchers, graduate students, journalists, academics from across the country, and community partners that are foiling death records and interpreting those death records using a really sophisticated protocol that we put together with community. There's around 260 questions that are a part of that protocol, and we turn autopsy records into data that then allow us to identify patterns of people dying in police custody from around the country. And then we produce reports, and we put those reports in the hands of lawmakers and community organizers and everyday people so they can see the magnitude of the problem. The Coroner's Report project is one part of the lab, and that's been, you know, the real work that we've been doing over the last six years. But the lab is also involved in, you know, trying to reframe how we think about safety and security, because I think until we confront all of the propaganda that has convinced us to believe that we're only safe if we have police, we're never going to get out of this system. And so the lab has been really a kind of powerful partnership between everyday people who really have the wisdom and expertise changing the way that I, as an academic and as a researcher, train and work with other young minds to solve this larger problem. It's been a real powerful component of. Of of our work over the last six years, and it's really changed the kind of research that I do as a scholar here at ucla.
- [53:53]
Scott Parkin
It's important work. And the book is also very much worth the read. Folks. We've been talking with Terence Keel, the author of the Coroner Silence, Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. We'll put a link to the book in the show notes as well. Folks, if you really like us, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you listen to us on audio platform, give us a rate review. If you really like this, go to greenredpodcast.org and hit that support button. Become a patron@patreon.com Green Red podcast Been really great talking with you today. Really appreciate you coming on with us.
- [54:28]
Professor Terence Keel
So thanks. Scott thanks, Robert Yep, Everyone else out
- [54:31]
Scott Parkin
there, make trouble and misbehave and we'll talk to you again soon.
- [54:43]
Professor Terence Keel
Sam.