← New Books Network
New Books Network
The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
00:57:50
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hey, NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network audience survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries, and institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:15]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am so pleased to be joined by Dr. Terrence Keel, who is the author of the Coroner Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. Welcome to the show, Dr. Kiel.
- [01:43]
C
Hey, thanks, Christina. Appreciate you having me here.
- [01:46]
B
I am so glad that you're here and that we are going to dive into your book with you. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
- [01:55]
C
Sure. So, I am a bit of an interdisciplinary scholar. I have degrees in the study of religion and theology, the history of science, history of race, history of medicine, American history. I spent a lot of time thinking about philosophy and sociology. So I wear many different hats as a. As a scholar, and I think that that reflects itself in the kinds of things that I've written about and have taught about over my career. I've written about race and genetics, the Anathal genome. Why is it that science and medicine can't emancipate itself from the race concept to this most recent work in the coroner? Silence. Which is what's wrong with our death investigation system? How did it emerge? Why is it failing Americans and what we can do about it? So These are the things that are on my mind as a scholar. And again, it's, it's a, it's a real joy to be here.
- [02:55]
B
One of the things we're curious about at the academic life is how people found their path. When you think back to younger you who was 16 or 17 years old, did you imagine where you are now?
- [03:06]
C
Oh, good question. I, 16 year old me was a very different human being than I am now, I'll say that much. I think the path for me to be a scholar really began when I was a undergraduate at Xavier University in New Orleans, which is the only historically black Catholic institution in the country. And while I was at Xavier, was very influenced by a group of just brilliant and radical Marxist Catholic theologians who exposed me to this wide literature in liberation theology and really sort of Marxist theory and literature and many of the kind of great scholars in the pantheon of African American studies and African American history. And I was incredibly inspired by how I would leave these classrooms and my head would be buzzing and I could literally feel and see my perception of the world shifting just after a couple of hours in one of these classes. And I thought to myself, that's something that I want to do. I want to help young people change their minds. And the path of the scholar was something that I was drawn to. And I loved reading and thinking through problems and trying to sit and inhabit another world, an older world, you know, reading works from the 18th and 19th century and so forth and so on. So I've, I've. I think that that's where the path started. And I was fortunate to be at a small black liberal arts college that really kind of prepared me and propelled me to where I am now.
- [04:51]
B
The book is dedicated to all of the misremembered victims of police violence. You tell us in the book about a number of things that inspired you to write the book, people that you met. As someone who's read the book, I think hearing you talk about liberation theology is an underpinning theme here as well. For listeners who may not have had a chance to see the book yet, how would you describe what inspired you to undertake this project?
- [05:23]
C
You know, I wrote this book when protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were beginning to wane. And I think it's important that listeners hear that because I understood in 2020 that all of the response, all of the commitment to Black Lives Matter and creating a global protest around policing eventually was going to swing in a different direction. And we are now in that moment where the book is sitting in A political social time where the activism, the resources, the moral clarity and political commitment to reeling in this police state that takes too many people's lives. We need to be reminded of those values and we need to be reminded of the fact that the protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were the largest modern protests in modern history. Every single continent had a protest for Black Lives Matter and against over policing of black and brown communities. And so I intuitively understood where we were going to go. So I wanted to write this book and do so in a way that honored all of the struggle that the families that I've been speaking to and working with for the last six years on this issue here in LA and other parts of the country have really committed themselves to. I mean, they really have become experts in what's wrong with this system of over policing, incarceration, and more importantly, how the people that we put in charge to tell us the truth about what happens when people die during arrest or in jail are actually not doing that. They're remaining silent rather than actually telling us what we need to know to create the kinds of safety and systems of accountability that we all deserve. So I wanted to write this book in the honor of all of the victims of police violence and people who we will never know. Because, as I later discuss in the book, there are so many names that have been lost to history who have died from police violence, but we have not created the systems or the infrastructure to record their names. And so there's going to be people that we will never be able to fully recover. And that's a tragedy. And I wanted to write a book to. To get everyone up to speed with a reality that I think many communities around our country have been dealing with for decades.
- [07:52]
B
In the book, you take us to the George Floyd protests and his death, and you tell us about someone named John Horton III and about his mother. Can you tell us about how meeting his mother really was pivotal for you?
- [08:11]
C
John Horton III lost his life shortly after his 22nd birthday inside of Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles on March 30, 2009. And I met his mother, Helen Jones, about a decade later. Helen had been working first to figure out what happened to her son. Law enforcement claimed that he hung himself in solitary confinement in his jail cell. But John wasn't under suicide watch. He had no history of mental illness, and he and her were incredibly close. And she never got any indication at all that John was thinking about ending his life. And so his death was highly suspicious. And when she got his body at a local mortuary here in Los Angeles. She found a tremendous amount of violence. She found his nose appeared to be broken. There was blood in his lips and his mouth. He had abrasions and lacerations all over his face. His wrist had a flesh wound, which was created by being handcuffed and being beaten, and was struggling while being beaten. He had recent hematomas and injuries to his back muscles. How could these things have happened? Helen asked. With her son being in solitary confinement, there's no way that these injuries could have been something he would have afflicted on himself. He was beaten to death, and his death was staged to look like a suicide. And so Helen put pressure on the county, began looking for other families and organizations that would listen to her story and help her really inform all of us about just how violent and terrible this system is. We think about jail as places where we lock up the bad guys and people who are violent offenders. But the truth is, when you look at who's in our jails, only a small percentage, less than 20% of people who are in jail right now are there for violent offenses. The vast majority of people who are in jail are for nonviolent crimes and nonviolent offenses. And the only reason why they're in there is because we have a cash bail system that preys on the poor and people who cannot afford to free themselves for their day in court. And so Helen really was a catalyst for this project, for this book, for this undertaking of trying to recover the history of this death investigation system, explain how and why it fails so many Americans, and then to sort of tell readers what I learned working in community and working with families who taught me how to read an autopsy. And I mean that in the sense of, you know, I have degrees in medicine and history. I can read an autopsy, but I could not read an autopsy against the grain, to pull a story out of the autopsy that local officials didn't want to be told. That was something that I had to be taught, and I couldn't have learned it without working in community. So incredibly indebted and grateful to Helen Jones and all the many other family members who are a part of helping this book become a reality.
- [11:21]
B
You spoke a moment ago about nonviolent offenses. And when I was reading about John Horton III's arrest, the whole story of him being arrested at all is quite puzzling. His mother called for help because he had uncontrollable vomiting, Right?
- [11:36]
C
That's right. He was in the middle of a health crisis. And when I Learned his story. It was heartbreaking when you just wrap your head around it. Can you imagine your worst day? You wake up, you have a headache, you are dry heaving, you are vomiting. The last thing that any of us would ever imagine in that situation is that we would be thrown into a jail in solitary confinement. But that's what happened to John. But it isn't just John. There were so many other people that I would later learn who were in the middle of a mental health crisis or a health crisis, or needed an institution of care. They pick up the phone, they call for paramedics, they call for ems, and instead they're met with police and they shortly thereafter lose their lives. So John's story, in a lot of ways is common. Tragically, it's happening daily. We are having people who are, and I talk about this in the book, already living on life's edge. And I don't mean that because of individual choices and behavior. I mean that because we live in a country without a social safety net. There are many Americans who don't have access to health insurance and regular healthcare and are living with unmet needs. We're dealing with people in this country that are weathered from being abandoned by our democratic institution. We tragically live in a country where health is about wealth. If you got the money to pay, you can live a long, healthy life. If you don't, then you are going to have chronic illness and disease and you might just end up being arrested and losing your life because of this. And I think we have to think about the sort of tragedy of incasity death in this broader frame because it allows us to see that many of the victims of police violence were already failed many times over by local, county and federal government.
- [13:25]
B
You tell us in the book that you had had no idea that law enforcement had become the preferred agency of local government to manage people in crisis because of diminishing social services and the evaporation of fair wages, affordable shelter, accessible medical care and competent mental health services. You also tell us that the degree of separation between ourselves and victims of police violence, lethal or not, is much smaller than we have been willing to talk about collectively. The book, you tell Us was written after spending countless hours with the dead, their loved ones, and nearly a thousand autopsy reports. You credit Helen for teaching you how to read autopsy reports and countless other family members who experienced similar loss of loved ones while their loved one was in custody. Can you take us into this amassing of a thousand autopsy reports? Because in several places in the book you let us know how impossible this task was the gatekeepers and the firewalls that make what should be a public record impossible really, in many cases to access.
- [14:43]
C
You know, what I didn't realize was we, there is nothing in our Constitution that guarantees our right to know the dead. And what I mean by that is that there are laws across the 50 states of United States of America that determine who can read autopsies, who can read and get access to death records, especially the records of people who are losing their lives while under the custodial power and care of the state. There are states across the country where you can't get these records. So places like Connecticut and Delaware and Maine and Massachusetts and New York, these are not open record states in the sense of autopsies are not protected by their open records laws. California, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, these are places where you can get access to death records. So there's a discrepancy here. Right? And the discrepancy doesn't map itself on to red or blue state. Right. I mentioned Maryland and I mentioned Massachusetts, and I mentioned, you know, New York. These are all traditionally voting blue states. Right. And so it, it became really clear to me early. Boy, this is not a system that allows for transparency. There's something anti democratic about how the records written by a medical examiner who examines a body after someone has died in state custody, that that report itself does not mean that the general public is ever going to read or get access to it. And if that doesn't happen, then how do we have the knowledge and the data we need to hold police or medical examiners and local officials accountable when we are losing people under circumstances that no one should die? So to get these records required me and my community partners and all the brilliant students who make up my lab at ucla, the Lab for Biocritical Studies, we had to submit FOIA requests to get these records. But before we did that, we had to get the names of the people who died in police custody. And that wasn't easy to get because there is not a single government institution, at any level of government, county, state or federal, that can give you the names of every single person who's been killed and by police in our nation's history. So just sit with that a little bit. There isn't a single agency that can do that. We didn't even bother to start counting the dead from police violence until 2000 when Congress passed the Death and Custody Reporting Act. So what that means is that we don't know the names of people who were killed by police in 1990. Or in 1965 and 1966, at the zenith of the civil rights era, where we know police violence was out of control, or even at the. At the zenith of racial lynching in America in the nineteen teens. Right. Like, we'll never know all the dead, and that's because we've never bothered to count them. And so now, as a scholar and an archivist and a researcher trying to recover this history, it required me to be creative, find multiple different data sets that don't rely on government. So turning to nonprofit orgs and journalists and just informed concerned citizens to piece together a list that we call in my lab, the list of lost lives, and then use that list to go after records and open record states where we could get the autopsy. So it was a complex set of steps that we had to walk through before we could even see the story. And even the picture of the story that we currently have, it's a missing one. It's a. It's a. It's a piecemeal one. It's not complete because again, we will never know all these names of the people who died in police custody before 2000, because Congress never mandated for law enforcement or states and counties to report this information.
- [18:31]
B
You tell us in the book that these are records that turn the deceased into an agent of their own death. And you also talk to us about how they are designed to separate the body's biology from the society that lives in the body and has shaped and informed the body. Can you talk to us about actually sitting with an autopsy report and being with this record of the end of someone's life?
- [19:03]
C
Most of us, when we think about medical records, we think about the records that we get from our physician or doctor. We go to the doctor because we injured ourself playing soccer, or we woke up out of bed and threw our back out, or maybe we came down with some sort of cold or flu or illness. And when you get that record, you're going to see something. If they give you the summary that is going to be very clean and linear and clear. It'll say things that you did. This thing, like moved awkwardly in your bed and it created some sort of a tension in the back that caused inflammation and that these are the drugs that are designed to treat this particular issue. Right. That clarity is not there when we look at autopsies and death records. And it is astonishing because you would think that at the end of someone's life, our elected officials, our government institutions would want to be. Would want to honor the dead, would want to Write a story that allows closure for families and communities that are losing people in the custody of police and law enforcement. But instead what I found is the absence of actors passive language, sentence construction that obscures who inflicted what. So some of these records read where someone will be arrested by law enforcement and it'll say law enforcement approached the deceased. The deceased was put into a prone restraint maneuver. The deceased became unresponsive. It's unclear did the prone restraint maneuver make them unresponsive? How many people were involved in that prone restraint maneuver? What, were there other weapons involved? Were they tased? Were they pepper sprayed? Those details are very difficult to find and sometimes they're entirely missing. And you only discover them by finding other parts in the autopsy. Particularly looking at the anatomical section of the autopsy where there are injuries that are not discussed in the stories that are told by the coroner and the medical examiner. And so these records have a way of creating ambiguity. And in that ambiguity it's very often the pre existing health condition or the behavior or the substance abuse problem of the victim that ultimately accounts for why they died. The example that I talk about in the very beginning of the book is George Floyd's autopsy, which many of us might be familiar with. Hennepin county medical examiner said that the death was a homicide. But they also double spoke. Because when you look at the autopsy, the very top line of the autopsy I quote is death from cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual. What that meant was that George Floyd had a bad heart. He went into cardiac arrest because of this. It made it hard for police to subdue and arrest him. So they had to use more force. And you just sit and you think about that sentence and it's got causality in the wrong direction. It's saying, well his biology, something was wrong with it. He, his heart had an abnormality and he was going to probably die from this anyways. Police didn't actually actively do much beyond trying to subdue him and do things within the confines of the law. Now we all saw the video, we know better exactly what happened to him. But again this is a record that I don't think if it weren't for Danilo Frazier recording that video and posting it on social media, we would have known anything about George Floyd. And the truth of the matter is that there are daily George Floyds happening all the time. We just don't know about it because it's so hard and so difficult to get access to these records. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case.
- [22:48]
B
We're gonna crack this case and prove we're the greatest partners of all time.
- [22:51]
C
New friends.
- [22:52]
B
You are Gary Destiny. And your last name.
- [22:55]
C
The Snake Dream Team. New habitats.
- [22:59]
B
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [23:03]
C
You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working it.
- [23:08]
B
Zootopia 2.
- [23:09]
C
Now available on Disney.
- [23:11]
B
Rated PG. Circling back to the earlier example that we spoke about. When Helen Jones got the autopsy about her son John Horton iii. It basically said he simultaneously died from by suicide and from being assaulted.
- [23:33]
C
Yes, that's right. Which is a contradiction in terms. Either he hung himself or he didn't. Which is exactly what Helen Jones was asking. And she put pressure on the medical examiner. Explained to me how could this back injury happen to someone in solitary confinement? Explain to me how the bridge and why the bridge of his nose was broken open. Explain to me why there are blood, why there's blood on his orange jumpsuit. These are things that can't be reconciled easily with a suicide determination. Right. But not everyone is going to have a Helen Jones in their family. Not everyone's going to have an advocate who's going to push and demand that these physicians and doctors who write these death records answer to the questions of family and grieving community. And so it should be the job of our government to ask these questions. We should have a checks and balance system. I often think about it this way. It's far more difficult for me to publish a peer reviewed journal article than. I don't know than the New England Journal of Medicine or Nature. It's so much more difficult for me to do that than it would be for one official to write an official death record. Because in that system that we currently have, there's one medical examiner who may work with a coroner who's underneath them. They write the record and then the record becomes the official document about what happened. There's not a third party that reviews it. There's not a blind party review system. It's not subjected to public scrutiny. It's the final word. What happens when the final word is wrong or the medical examiner is silent about things that they should be speaking about. Who is there to watch this system? Family and community have been the watch, the watchers paying attention to this. But it's an absurd thing to ask people impacted by the system to also be the police of that system. We need and should have a government that works for the people. These records are written in the public's interest. There should be agencies that are independent of policing and law enforcement that should be a part of this. And that's something that communities are asking for and demanding for because the scale of the violence is so tremendous.
- [25:39]
B
Chapter two is called Illiberal Investigators. And this chapter calls attention to the medical examiners and coroners who investigate in custody deaths. It also takes us through the modernization of the coroner. We might assume that how these deaths are investigated or pretend to be investigated now has been how it always was. And we. We might assume that because of advances in science and medicine, it's far more accurate than it has ever been. But you take us through what it was like and what it has become, and you find a lot has been lost through this modernization process. Can you take us through this history that you outlined for us in chapter two?
- [26:27]
C
You know, the coroner's office is one of the oldest democratic institutions in American history. We have a coroner because it comes from English law. And before this country was an independent nation, when it was just a mere colony with vested interests from the crown and other entrepreneurs in England. The crown of England would send over people that were called crowners, and their job was to investigate circumstances when someone had been given large sums of money to create a plantation or to extract natural resources from the colony. If that person by chance died of yellow fever or, or some other unexplained illness, the crowner's job was to make sure that assets and investments were returned back to the crown after American independence. The crowner became the coroner. This is the kind of edema, the connection between these two words and the coroner's job is and was to investigate a mysterious, untimely death. And they would do this by holding an inquest jury. So they would gather 12 citizens who in the 18th century and early 19th century were free white property holding men. They would gather an inquestory of these 12 men. And those 12 men would have a discussion about what happened before, during and after this person died. Was there someone traveling through the town that, you know, seemed to be mysterious? Was there a virus or an outbreak at an epidemic nearby? Could this be a death explained by what they called at the time the visitation of God, which is what we would call a natural death, or you can't quite explain what it is. There was something about that person that caused them to die. That jury would then determine who was accountable, what charges were to be brought, and then they would inform the coroner to arrest. Well, they would get the sheriff to do it, to arrest the person that was accountable. It was a system of Direct democracy. What happened after 1865 as the extension experiment and democracy, it's opened up to African Americans and other non white populations, is that the medical examiner system becomes more modern. The impetus for this modernization was all about doctors and physicians feeling like, hey, you know what, if someone's going to be investigating somebody's body, they should be a licensed physician. Because to be a coroner in our early history, you didn't have to have a doctorate degree at all. You could just be a ambitious entrepreneur who wanted to have an inroad to politics. And being a death investigator or a coroner was one way to do it. The first mayor of Los Angeles under Anglo Saxon American rule was a guy named Alpheus Hodges, who comes over to California for the gold rush. Doesn't work out for him. He gets a job as the first mayor and also the first coroner of Los Angeles. He wore both hats. So modernization happens. It's about trying to train physicians to be embedded in empirical observation, medicine, science, et cetera. All the things that we think make death investigation better. And they do to a certain extent. But the one thing that also happened throughout the end of the 19th century and all the way until about 1950, when the process was complete, they insulated death investigators from the public. So we lost this direct democracy that was at the very beginning of the republic, where death investigators had to answer to the questions of local community. We don't have that system any longer. Community. They are detached and separate from the investigator. There's some legal history for why that is, but the consequence is that we have these investigations when people die in police custody and they don't yield the results that family and community want because communities aren't a part of the investigation. And when and if medical examiners hold an inquest, which not every state even allows an inquest any longer, some states actually abolish the inquest. In fact, there's only 20 states where an inquest can be held. And I've witnessed these inquests. They are what I call political pageantry. They give us the appearance of democracy, but the result is often very anti democratic. They rubber stamp the processes of the medical examiner and they rubber stamp the actions of law enforcement. They don't actually get to questions of accountability or culpability or, or, you know, some sort of accountability in ways that would create the justice that people are looking for. And so this is the system we currently have. And because of this, families and communities have been organizing around the country trying to actually hold this system accountable. And the work that I've been doing in my lab with organizations around the US Is to provide our own version of this. We get these death records, we work with community. We create a system that allows us to analyze these autopsies. We've produced reports. We put those reports in the hands of organizations and elected officials and media and inform citizens to show, hey, look, there's something going on with this death record that is inconsistent with what the county actually wrote or what the medical examiner wrote. There needs to be further investigation. But we're a small outfit, and there are again, five people die every day from police violence. We only will know the names of three of those people. If you do the math on this, we're talking about a staggering number of deaths. We need a system capable of holding the deaf investigators accountable. And we need a system that gets us back to direct democracy. We've lost that.
- [31:56]
B
Chapter three is called Society Lives in the Body. And in. In this chapter, one of the things that stood out for me was the section on President Truman trying to launch universal healthcare. The. One of the underpinnings of this book is that what you are finding is not an isolated thing. It is the product of many, many pieces of society functioning to create this outcome and that it can and should be different. And one example of a moment when it could have turned to start to be different was when President Truman wanted to launch universal healthcare. Can you talk about this role of care and lack of it in how we are where we are?
- [32:43]
C
Yeah. I want readers and listeners to know that when people die in custody, it's not just because police ended their lives. Well, that is clear and obvious. It is also because people have been living beyond the social safety net. And that social safety net includes very basic material things that we just don't provide Americans in this country. Health care, stable employment, shelter. These are basic material needs. And when you live in a society that can't figure out how to get universal health care, as Truman was trying to do. And Truman was fighting not just against conservative forces that didn't want to pay for Americans that had basic health care. It was also fighting against the American Medical association and the American Hospital Association. During a time of Jim Crow, Many physicians and advocates of medicine, mid century, did not want universal health care, partially because they understood that it would be a backdoor way to desegregate American public spaces. If black folks could get universal healthcare, meaning they could go to any hospital or doctor that they wanted to, that means that they could go to a white hospital and vice versa. Whites could go to a black Hospital. We're in the grip of segregation during the Truman administration. And so there's real resistance that he and others who have tried to make the argument for universal healthcare have had to fight against, frankly, an embedded racism that does not want to give black Americans health and resources out of a fear that if you give this to a population, they'll become more politically empowered. And if they become more politically empowered, guess what can happen? You can change the country by actually having a pluralist, multicultural democracy. So in a way, our nation's unwillingness to acknowledge the civil rights and political power of black people have put the entire country at risk for dying from heart disease and hypertension and cancer and other things. Why? Because we have intentionally cut up the social safety net, not given people universal healthcare or free health care, out of a fear that black and brown folks are going to get something that might actually improve their political power. And we're seeing the consequences of this in the rust belt and in parts of the south where white Americans are suffering with opioid addiction and unmet health needs. So it's a problem that began with a kind of very clear anti black racism that has now emerged into a larger crisis of health where Americans compared to our other advanced industrial democracies at every scale, our life expectancy is behind Britain, it's behind France, it's behind other advanced industrial democracies. And there's a reason for that. We cannot get on board with the mandate of giving health to populations out of a fear of what power politically is going to, how that's going to change the political landscape of the country. And so I read death, deaths in custody as kind of a final tragic point in this larger story of sustained neglect of American people.
- [36:05]
B
Havlas espanol spries to joy. If you used babbel you would. Babbel's conversation based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com Spotify spelled B A B-B-E L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may apply. You mentioned where we are in healthcare in comparison to several other countries. You also tell us that more Americans will die this year in custody than in Canada, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom combined. In this Chapter Society lives in the body. You bring up the 23 page autopsy report of Alicia Thomas. She's someone who needed the type of supports that you're talking about and they were not available to her. And it went catastrophically wrong for her in ways she couldn't see. And reading her story, we can't foresee.
- [37:19]
C
Yeah, you know, Alicia Thomas was 30 year old black mother of two who was in the middle of a health crisis sometime around midnight. And she had the wherewithal to understand, look, I'm not doing well. I'm going to take my children, my babies to the local police station, I'm going to give them a bundle of clothes, a little bit of food, and I'm going to return home to manage this crisis. Just imagine the state that you have to be in where there aren't local resources. There's not a hotline that she thought she could call a trustworthy voice on the other line that could send, I don't know, social services, maybe mental health support, not to mention the lack of support that she probably needed before she got to this point of acute crisis. And what happens is that law enforcement ascertain the address from her children and they follow her home. And within 10 minutes she's dead. She is subjected to violence. She undergoes cardiovascular, a cardiovascular incident. She has a heart attack. Law enforcement see that she's not compliant and they see it as aggression rather than, oh, this is someone dealing with medical distress. Any person who's trained to look at what stress and mental illness does to the body would have noticed. So you know, she's, this woman's experiencing a health crisis, so police didn't, didn't see that. And she tragically lost her life. She dies in the back of the patrol car in the view of the camera in the actual police car. And her story matters because when you think about just the health infrastructure, the broken health infrastructure in a city like Los Angeles, there are many families who are just barely getting by, who are daily or weekly dealing with health crises that could end up tragically them losing their lives in police custody. And it gets me back to something that we talked about a little bit earlier. The degree of separation between ourselves and victims of police violence or the possibility of finding ourselves, ourselves ensnared in police violence is much smaller than you realize. I mean, how many of us have family members we know that might be dealing with opioid addiction or chronic pain or family members who are dealing with mental illness? And if you think about just where we are as a nation, gas is how much, how expensive are eggs? People can't find homes. We're dealing with polluted air, polluted groundwater, et cetera. You add all these things up, and we're just one bad mental health day away from finding ourselves in the back of a patrol car and possibly dying. And I think this is what I want your readers and listeners to understand, that dying in custody is not just a black and brown problem. When I looked at all the victims of police violence between 2000 and 2020, there were 32,100 people who died just during arrests. It's not even dealing with people who died in jails, just people who died who were still constitutionally innocent. Okay? And when I look at that number, the biggest demographic are white Americans. They make up around 32% of all those deaths. So what that tells us is whiteness does not protect people from police violence or state violence. Black and brown communities have known this for decades. But I really think it's white America that has its own strange relationship to state violence and police, because there's this idea that, you know, cops and jails keep us safe. Well, if that were true, Los Angeles would be the safest place in the country. It's got the largest police department, the largest sheriff's department, the largest jail system that houses, on any given day, 12,000 people. And yet we lead the nation in, in custody death, unmet mental health needs, people who are unhoused, people who are dealing with substance abuse, et cetera. So there's a real moral reckoning that needs to happen about what kind of country we want and what we need to be giving to Americans who are really living on the edge.
- [41:11]
B
In that chapter, you say we struggle to recognize the appearance of society inside the bodies of vulnerable people. Chapter four is called Collecting Fragments. And in this, you say that you are telling impossible stories. One of the stories you use to illustrate this point is the journey to find the records about the death of Daniel Pastorek. He was 63, white. He lived in Pennsylvania. Some of the policies and laws there would indicate that obtaining his autopsy records and the information about the manner of his death would. Would be more straightforward. But that was not the case.
- [41:52]
C
Pennsylvania is an open record state, meaning that autopsies and death records are available to any citizen who's willing to get access or try to get access to those records. But what Pennsylvania has also done is it's created barriers to access. It has, first of all, required you to pay a $500 fee. Fee to get access to every component of the autopsy. Now a full Autopsy involves three components. An anatomical summary written by a doctor, a statement of events written by a coroner who goes on the scene and investigates and interviews police and other people, and then a toxicology report. You do the math there. You're talking about almost over $1,000, 1,500 bucks just to get access to what happened. And in the case of Daniel Pastorick, he was unhoused, didn't have necks of kin. And Brittany Hayler, who was an investigative journalist who really broke the story on this, she obtained his record through the local pathonery, which is a sort of similar to accounting clerk. They. They gather records from multiple different agencies across the county, and then you can get death records from them. She got this record after great effort and actually winning a lawsuit, she had to take the county to court. And to win access to the record, I had to do something very similar for other records in Chester county in Pennsylvania, which shouldn't have happened because these are protected under state law. But the coroner system there has just gotten so used to no one asking about the record that when media or researchers began to raise those questions, they immediately went on the defense, and we required us to go to court to get those records. So it tells you something. What are they hiding? Why is it so difficult to get this transparent document? And some of the conservative arguments is, oh, well, this is a researcher from Los Angeles. Why is he interested in this? We got to protect families, privacy, et cetera. I've spoken to countless families who have lost loved ones to police violence, and not a single one of them has told me, we don't want our family's record out in the public. Instead, many of the families that I work would say, I want you to tell the story of what happened to my sister or my brother or my husband or my son so that this doesn't happen to someone else. And the impetus for this is to be a democratic society and use democratic transparency to hold state institutions accountable, especially when they fail us. That's the point. We would want a society like this. And I think our ideas about law and order politics are just not genuine. If we really believe in justice, this system as it currently stands cannot stand longer. It is antithetical to the basic dignity of people, not to mention routinely violates the constitutional rights of people who are arrested or put into jail.
- [44:40]
B
In this chapter, you take us into your research, into your lab, into the work to create a system of collecting data and making sense of it, and you say, the death ledger we assembled was staggering. Between 2000 and 2020, police killed 32,104 people during arrest. For perspective, between 1608 and 2022, there were 16,047 executions. In just 20 years, police killed more than twice the number of all prisoners executed in U.S. history. Dying in custody is the new capital punishment. On page 107, figure 4.2. You list cause of death for reported lethal police encounters during arrest or pursuit between 2000 and 2020. And it is a staggering and sobering list to read. Can you talk to us about dying in custody as the new capital punishment?
- [45:48]
C
Yeah, when you die during arrest. And that's what that figure was, that 32,000 victims. Over 32,000 victims. These are all people who were constitutionally innocent, meaning they had not gone in front of a judge to defend their innocence or to say, you know what? I did do this crime. That should be alarming to anyone who thinks that our criminal justice system actually works, because again, it's very difficult to say that if we are already deciding people are guilty and then were ending their lives on the streets. And when I looked at just how people were dying, I mean, I wasn't surprised to find that the vast majority, around 70% of these deaths are from gunshots, you know, police using the firearms. I think most Americans, most of us know this, but what I didn't know was that the second leading cause of how people were dying were police using their cars. Using their cars during high, high speed pursuits, forcing people to do maneuvers that are dangerous. They lose control of their car, they crash, that person dies. That's an in custody death, or police chasing after someone and they kill an innocent bystander. Or police are, you know, in a patrol car with their lights off and they get a call and they turn the engine on and they hit a bystander who's walking on the street. Case after case after case, I found police killing people with their cars. You know, and it was so surprising because I didn't think, you know, it would be such a high amount, but it was and it is. And it tells us again, just the amount of power law enforcement have that they can subject other people to harm and injury and even death and not be tried or prosecuted for it because it falls within the jurisdiction of what they can do legally. The bar to arrest law enforcement or to charge them for crimes is incredibly high. And so looking at the, the, the ways that people are being taken from us was really sobering to just realize the amount of death that's happened from what we can see. And again, in the chapter is about, you know, pulling the fragments together. And I use Sadiya Hartman to kind of think through how do you tell a story about this violence when the people who write those stories, who leave the archival record, never imagined anyone would read these documents and be sympathetic to the victim. So she's talking about this in the context of how do you tell stories about formerly enslaved women and children who die? I'm thinking about this in the context of how do you tell stories about people that the public has already assumed are guilty? The public has already assumed this person did something wrong and they deserved what happened to them, because that's how these records are written. There is a shift that has to happen within us as people. And I'm hoping that when you are confronted with this, these stories and the data about it, it shifts that perspective and allows us to see there's something terribly wrong.
- [48:40]
B
You say on page 118, our nation's use of violence to enforce the law and then conceal where the bodies are hidden is a disorienting phenomenon to witness. The data also is disoriented. You talk about how they don't always record a person's gender, how the majority of, of these people whose records you were able to collect of them, of them dying in police custody, were so young, under 25. These are people whose brains still need another year to finish growing. They're not fully even reached adulthood yet. And you've mentioned the important role of audio and video footage. And for people who have had a chance to review some of that, for these young people, it must be especially disorienting for them because you can hear not only different officers yelling different directions, but a single officer yelling contradictory directions. And such a brief window in which they can. The officer will determine if the person is complying or not, or else they will use these other methods. And also on this list are things that are often called non lethal force. And yet you have about a thousand people dying from being tasered. It's disorienting to sit with your data.
- [50:04]
C
It was disorienting to pull the data together for all the reasons you list. The staggering amount of violence, the different methods that can be used, the fact that even less than or non lethal weapons in fact kill people all the time. I've published an article with my colleague Jonah Walters, it's the first journal article on the history of pepper spray, showing how lethal it is and how the suppression of that knowledge of its lethality has happened in American history deliberately. You know, I think the disorientation also comes in the fact that when my lab put together this list of lost lives that I mentioned earlier to gather these death records, there were people that we couldn't get their. Their autopsies because the police department, which is, by the way, the ones that are responsible under DIKRA Death and Custody Reporting act to report the names of the people that they kill. So just sit and think about that a little bit. The people who are doing the violence and doing the killing are the ones who are reporting about it. So you can see the conflict of interest, and we could see it in the data. First of all, police are not statisticians, meaning they are not trained to think about data consistency, what kind of information to be reported at what granular level. So when I was trying to pull data from different counties, again, some counties would have race, age, and gender, some wouldn't. Some would have the case number, but not the name of the victim. The gender would sometimes be difficult to determine. The manner and cause of death would not always be documented the same. So even if we got the record, there was this staggering amount of sort of inconsistency that had to be worked through. And again, we're talking about people's lives. We're talking about people who should still be alive. And you just would not imagine it would be this difficult to do this work until you begin to realize how this system, it's designed this way on purpose. It's designed to make it difficult to know the dead. Why do we have this system? Whose interests does it serve? Because it doesn't serve you or me or anyone who wants to feel safe in this country. I think those are the kinds of questions that I leave readers to grapple with. As, As I was narrating how it was that my research team and the community partners came to this larger vision.
- [52:20]
B
You tell us early on that you wrote the book for the family and friends of people lost to police violence. And then it's also for people concerned about police violence and looking for guidance on how to think about this issue. You say that you are also making a moral argument about the flaws of our criminal justice system, our indifference to the people on the wrong side of the law, and perhaps most importantly, the violence we are willing to tolerate for the illusion of safety in a nation with staggering inequalities. Chapter five is called Perishing, and it takes us into more stories of people killed while in police custody. Chapter six is called the Bodies that We Don't See. See. We're coming close to the end of our time together, and I want to Pull one quote from chapter six. When you were sharing about your research with friends and families, they said, how terrible. But I'm not surprised. There are other places in the book where you talk about the fatigue and contempt many Americans carry for people who remind us of where society is broken. On page 2026, you say there is no path beyond this current system without reaffirming the dign of people taken by police. What would you like listeners to take away?
- [53:38]
C
Dr. Q. I think we have to examine our beliefs about law, order and safety. I think that we have been socialized to imagine police make us safe, jails make us safe. But that isn't true. And the way that you know it's not true is by looking at the victims of those systems and see how so many people needed institutions of care. They needed doctors, they needed mental health workers, they needed insurance, they needed houses, they needed access to, you know, medication and clean food. These are basic material needs that we are denying everyday people. And we are using police to clean up the mess. And I think when you look at this system, it requires us to come out of this kind of malaise, this mythology of law and order. And it's hard to sustain that mythology when you see the victims of it. And I think that that is the overarching message of the book. It's. It's about looking at this death investigation system in corners and then moving gradually out and you begin to start to see these patterns of inequality, indifference, policy, violence, disinvestment in community, the evaporation of the social safety net. That's how you get people dying in custody. And if we want to remain in this illusion, it comes at a great sacrifice. And I think that people do carry, whether they realize it or not, some measure of contempt, some measure of frustration when we are snapped out of our delusion and realize, oh my God, George Floyd was killed in such a way, violent public way. Breonna Taylor was killed in such a violent public way. This has to change. And so I think we are in another moment where ICE agents are disappearing people on the streets, they're killing American citizens. People are being separated from their children. We are in another reckoning with state violence. And I think this is the moment again to be reminded of those convictions that we might have had during the George Floyd protests. And I hope that readers can see this is a problem that isn't going anywhere until we get involved.
- [55:53]
B
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Terrence Keel, and sharing from your book the coroner's death records and the hidden victims of police violence. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler. You're listening to Academic Life. Please join us again.
- [56:13]
C
Foreign. Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [56:38]
B
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.