The Coroner's Silence Sheds Light on Carceral and Police Abuse in the United States
The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence, by Terence Keel, Beacon Press, 212 pages, 2025.
Each year, approximately 1000 people – three a day – are killed by police officers or prison guards. Some, like Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Freddie Gray, and Breanna Taylor, capture media and activist attention; most do not. But Terence Keel, a professor of biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies, hopes to bring attention to this horrific statistic and change it.
The Coroner’s Silence, his second book, tracks the ways medical examiners, lawmakers, law enforcers, and government officials hide the deaths of people after they are arrested and placed in custody, more often than not attributing their passing to suicide or “natural causes.” Keel’s meticulous research contests these findings and, instead, casts blame for the loss of life on physical assault and medical neglect. It’s a grim, but important, read. Moreover, the many examples throughout the text illustrate what Keel calls ”a crisis hidden in plain sight.”
“Dying at the hands of police does not engender empathy from the investigators who write death records and official autopsies,” he writes. “In-custody deaths hardly seem to matter to lawmakers who enable these tragedies to thrive beyond the public’s awareness.”
They do, however, matter to the loved ones of the deceased, and The Coroner’s Silence highlights the intrepid work of organizations including Dignity and Power Now, Common Justice, and the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence to not only hold law enforcers accountable, but also promote robust alternatives to arrest and incarceration.
It’s a call to action writ large. Indeed, by challenging the idea that life can be ended when there is suspicion of lawbreaking – or when someone is in the throes of an acute mental health crisis - – the book centers the dead and provides a clear vision of humane and just governance that both protects public safety and protects the accused.