No human involved The serial murder of Black women and girls and the deadly cost of police indifference

When Cheryl Neely was a teenager, her friend Michelle was raped and murdered. After a half-hearted investigation, police arrested and forced a false confession from an innocent man. Over three decades later, the real killer confessed to Michelle's murder and seven others. Tragically, Michelle's story is not unusual. Violence against Black women and girls is regularly minimized and ignored by law enforcement, particularly if the victims are sex workers, struggling with drug addiction, or both. Confident that they will not be held to account, the attackers often go on to commit further crimes. No Human Involved explores violence against Black women in American cities, drawing from legal documents, interviews, and media reports to help readers understand this epidemic of violence and to introduce them to the community activists who work tirelessly to find justice for the dead. Neely's care for her subjects is obvious, as she tries to glean details about these women--beyond how they died--from heartbreakingly sparse records. Her clear-eyed, compassionate, and deeply researched book challenges its readers to fight for change.

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.)

A sociologist examines murders of Black women that have gone unnoticed, unsolved, and forgotten. Her account fueled by the murder of a 16-year-old girl in Detroit, Neely opens with appalling statistics: Black girls and women make up 7% of the U.S. population, but "they were three times more likely to die by homicide compared to white females." The violence has a certain circularity: law enforcement agencies assume that those Black girls and women brought the crimes onto themselves through drug use or prostitution. Chillingly, they're considered less than human, whence Neely's title, "used as a classification in homicide cases comprising victims whom police view as having little to no value as human beings." When the crimes are investigated, the police are often in a hurry to find a perpetrator--and often an innocent person goes to jail while the real perpetrators, often serial criminals and murderers, get away with it; knowing this, those real perpetrators have little incentive not to commit further crimes. In the case of that 16-year-old, decades passed before the true killer was tried and sentenced and the wronged man freed. "Had Detroit police valued the life of Michelle Kimberly Jackson, Eddie Joe Lloyd would not have lost eighteen years of his life to prison, the deaths of other potential victims would have been prevented, and the families of those victims would be spared the unbearable pain of losing a loved one," Neely charges. That all this happened speaks, she adds, to systemic racism, a habit of mind that even Black officers buy into. Neely concludes with the thoughts that greater advocacy for those forgotten women is needed and that cold cases are often opened through citizen action and, more recently, podcasts that demand accountability. Activists involved in equitable policing, judicial reform, and victims' rights will find value in Neely's account. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.