In No Human Involved (Beacon, Jan.), sociologist Cheryl L. Neely argues that police neglect of Black women homicide victims allows serial killers to flourish.
Your previous book, You’re Dead—So What?, deals with the same topic. How does this one differ?
The first book looked at how the media and police neglect the homicides of Black women. This one looks at the consequences of that—at how this pernicious pattern of neglect leads to serial killers going undetected. These killers, who target Black women, understand that the police don’t always work to solve these cases, that the media isn’t paying attention. They know it makes this group particularly vulnerable.
Many of the victims you write about were sex workers. Did that play a role in prejudicial treatment from police?
In the book, I show that white women who were sex workers got more attention and a more vigorous police response. Arthur Shawcross was a serial killer in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 1990s. He murdered 11 women—all sex workers, all white—and the police took those cases seriously. They even warned other sex workers that there was someone preying on their group. So when the sex workers are white, police still see them as worthy of protection and worthy of justice—as human beings. Hence the name of my book, “no human involved.” I didn’t make that up—that’s a phrase police in some precincts in Los Angeles used to denote murders of Black sex workers.
Why has law enforcement generally considered the murders of Black women to have been committed by someone they knew, rather than by a serial killer?
Police tend to deny that there is a serial killer, because once they have declared that there is one, people demand action; the media starts hounding the police, asking for updates. So the police can avoid all that headache by just simply saying that all of these women were killed by individual men. Right now, for example, there are at least 51 unsolved strangulations of Black women in Chicago, and the police are still denying there’s a serial killer.
Do you see the problem as more of a law enforcement one, or one of pervasive societal racism?
If we attribute this behavior to inherent racial bias, that’s a really hard problem to fix, because it’s been there since 1619, so to speak. But unfortunately that’s the root issue. Legislation like the Violence Against Women Act is only as good as its implementation. If it’s not being acted upon, it’s just words on a page. It all boils down to police seeing these women as fully human. I know they’re capable—but whether they’re willing, I do not know.
