No Human Involved
The Serial Murder of Black Women and Girls and the Deadly Cost of Police Indifference
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
An urgent examination of the invisibility of Black women and girls as victims of targeted killings, and the lack of police intervention and media coverage
When Black women and girls are targeted and murdered their cases are often categorized by police officers as “N.H.I.” – “No Humans Involved.” Dehumanized and invisible to the public eye, they are rarely seen as victims. In the United States, Black women are killed at a higher rate than any other group of women, but their victimhood is not covered by the media and their cases do not receive an adequate level of urgency.
Utilizing intensive historical research of cases in cities such as Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angles, Cheryl Neely calls attention to serial cases of Black female murder victims and a lack of police action. Neely approaches each case and story with detailed care. Instead of focusing solely on the killings and the murderers, she highlights the lives of the women and girls and their communities that never stopped fighting for justice. With media neglect and police indifference, Neely argues that because law enforcement is less likely to conduct serious investigations into the disappearances and homicides of Black women, they are particularly vulnerable to become victims.
Diving deep into the unseen and unheard, Neely uses personal interviews, court records, media reports, and analytical data to understand how and why Black women are disproportionately more likely to die from homicide in comparison to their white counterpoints. Sounding an urgent alarm, No Human Involved contends that it is time for Black women’s lives to matter not only to their families and communities, but especially to those commissioned to protect them.
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Sociologist and criminologist Neely (You're Dead—So What?) offers a rigorous, unsettling examination of how serial killers targeting Black women have murdered with impunity because of police bias against the victims. The issue has particular resonance for Neely: in 1984, her high school friend Michelle Kimberly Jackson was raped and strangled to death by a sexual predator, who evaded justice for decades, and who eventually confessed to seven additional slayings. The personal angle lends passion to Neely's writing, as she witnessed firsthand how Michelle's devastated family was callously dismissed by the police. (They suggested Michelle had "run away with a boyfriend.") Neely marshals extensive evidence showing that serial killers targeting Black women in cities across the U.S. since the 1970s—among them Boston, Chicago, and Charlotte, N.C.—went undetected as a result of the police's failure to investigate. The lack of even cursory investigative work in these cases is deeply troubling: for example, in 1990s Charlotte, police failed to do a "victimology" assessment, a basic technique when investigating murder, that would have revealed that the victims of Henry Louis Wallace, known as the "Taco Bell Strangler," were closely associated through school and employment—and that some even knew each other. It's a vital, infuriating addition to the literature on racial prejudice in U.S. law enforcement.
