No Human Involved: The Serial Murder of Black Women and Girls and the Deadly Cost of Police Indifference

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. (Jan.)