This work highlights survivors' voices in the exploration of police violence and homicide in the United States. Making vital connections between US colonialism, structured and deputized violence, history of policing, and armed resistance by grassroots movements, the authors expand readers' understanding of the purpose of U.S. policing.
Responding to data that showed that in 2016 and 2017, more than 135 children and teens lost their lives to police violence, the author team traveled to multiple locations across the United States to sit with, learn from, and capture survivors' stories and experiences. Utilizing in-depth and public interviews, the book presents breathtaking, honest, and heart-wrenching narratives surrounding the impact of youth killed by police on the family, community, and activists. This book makes important connections between colonialism, history of police corruption, and police killings of marginalized groups. Survivors' narratives provide important nuanced information surrounding the impact of youth killed by police, often with impunity, on friends, family, and loved ones of the victims.
Synthesizing these stories with an overview of the state of policing in the United States, this scholarship extends recommendations and strategies for organizers, activists, students, and scholars to redefine public safety, as well as police power and accountability, in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Rafael Outland and Thomas Noel, Jr. have produced a seminal work that sheds insights on a narrative of resistance that is not taught in schools, colleges and universities, until now. In fact, the current representatives of the corporate government seek to erase Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples contribution to the history of this country. It is this paradigm of government that Outland and Noel challenges in The Impact of Police Killings on the Family and Community of Youth Victims: JUSTIFIED, by giving voice to those who have fought back, resisted and sought to end systems of state-sanctioned violence, mass incarceration and ethnic-cleansing despite the fact this country's foundation is based on the aberrant philosophy of white supremacy, the genocidal annihilation of the Indigenous population and the enslavement of Afrikan people. JUSTIFIED, exposes and reveals the devastation of U.S. government policy that is based on the aberrant philosophy of white supremacy, and how this philosophy and praxis, at heart, is violent and anti-human."
Baba Jalil Muntaqim, co-Founder, National Jericho Movement; Spirit of Mandela Coalition; Author of We Are Our Own Liberators: Selected Prison Writings.
"Black death is something not to be trifled with. Not something to be made about ourselves. Not something to be captured and made about our personal advancement. Not something to be exploited for other ends. Black death is something to be held sacred and with high regard, especially a Black life that resulted in Black death by actions of the State and its agents. The work of Outland and Noel is one of the few attempts to make Black death legible, coherent, and honorable by elevating the dead through the voices of those that are living that loved them."
Rasul Mowatt, Ph.D., North Carolina State University and Too Black, Poet, Author, and FilmMaker (Pendleton 2); Co-Authors of Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits
"Outland and Noel's book reminds us that policing in the U.S. holds steady as the permanent reflection of enslavement, genocide and settler colonialism. Simultaneously, they also alert us that knowing is not enough. Their unapologetic efforts to enhance our knowledge on the origins of police terror and its lethal results on the lives of young people provides the fuel for us to think, talk and act."
David Stovall, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago; Author of Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption
"As the whirlpool of violence and the police killings of Black and Brown people continues apace, becoming normalized and commonplace, Rafael Outland and Thomas Noel, Jr. refuse to turn away. They chronicle an unspeakable atrocity by any measure-the police murders of children and youth, their victims ranging from 4-months to19-years old in a recent period-but they balk at merely documenting and archiving. They pursue the trauma to its outer limits, recording and illuminating the human cost of state terrorism and violence on mothers and fathers, siblings and friends, teachers and classmates, neighbors and indeed entire communities. They demonstrate that the state-sponsored brutality swirling through Black and Brown and poor communities, sweeping outward in a widening gyre with no end in sight, has devastating consequences on the entire society. And they offer a useful antidote to the pervasive and insidious copaganda that dehumanizes entire communities, presents petty crime in gaudy detail on the nightly news-car-jacking! shooting on the west side!-while down-playing or entirely disregarding other more serious crimes committed by the wealthy. This is an essential book for educators and organizers, for justice-seekers and freedom fighters, indeed for anyone who wants to understand the catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, and seeks a clear-sighted way forward."
Bill Ayers, PhD, Educator, Author, and Activist; Author of When Freedom Is The Question, Abolition Is The Answer: Reflections On Collective Liberation
"The precisely sniped children in Gaza are the brothers and sisters of the deliberately targeted U.S Black and Brown youth Rafael Outland and Thomas Noel study the killings of. An interconnected genocide for which the authors give us a textbook of explicit intent."
Mama Julia Wright, Poet, Author, Co-Founder/Member of the Mumia Health Committee; Editor of The Man Who Lived Underground
"The Impact of Police Killings on the Family concludes its painstaking, powerful work with a warning: "Our youth are our future and we must protect them at all cost." This book outlines historical and contemporary protections and defenses against predatory police violence. Emphasizing young Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous,Chicano/Latino working class and under-resourced children and teens, it details how state and society render racially-stigmatized youths as prey to predatory policing. Militarized police seek a "call to duty" that humiliates and disappears our young. This timely book calls us to resist and fight freedom battles that reject dystopia, and instead wages marronage-the Captive Maternal stage that emphasizes the fulcrum within reach of our grasp as liberators who recast CTSD (Continuing Trauma Stress Disorder) into a revolutionary catalyst.
Joy James, PhD, Williams College; Author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and The (After)Life of Erica Garner
"Outland and Noel's Justified is a passionately-argued exploration of one of the most important domestic catastrophes of our day. Offering voices too rarely centered in public debate, the book seeks and stays with the families and communities of children and teens killed by police. A vital project."
Micol Seigel, PhD, Indiana University; Author of Violence Works: State Power and the Limits of Police and Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States
Rafael Outland, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology at Alfred University in Alfred, NY.
Thomas Noel, Jr., PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Advanced Studies, Leadership, and Policy at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD.
1. A Caution to the Reader: Our Journey that Led to This Work 2. Understanding the History and Purpose of Policing in the U.S.: From Armed Resistance to an Epidemic of Police Killings 3. Groundings with the Families and Communities of Youth Killed by Police 4. Lessons from the Family and Community of Youth Killed by Police 5. Making Sense of the Senseless, Where Do We Go From Here 6. Implications for Our Collective Involvement, Epilogue
