CBH Talk | Terence Keel and Alex Vitale Discuss Death Records and Hiding Police Violence
Coroners’ reports are not innocuous. In his landmark study, scholar Terence Keel meticulously uncovers how death investigations can—and often do—obscure the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths. Now Keel has published his seminal research in a new book, The Coroner’s Silence; Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. It’s a startling revelation of how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical records, and strategically lost evidence have long shielded law enforcement from accountability.
Join Keel in conversation with expert Alex Vitale as they unpack this systemic concealment of state-sanctioned violence and expose the failures embedded within forensic medicine. With the precision of a scientist, the vision of an artist, and the testimony of families who have lost loved ones, Keel illuminates the realities of what happens inside America’s jails and prisons.
True accountability, Keel argues, requires more than procedural reform—it demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner’s Silence is a vital and unsettling intervention that forces us to confront the mechanisms through which systemic violence is normalized and sustained.
Participants
Terence Keel is an award-winning scholar, the founding director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, and a professor of human biology, society, and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science co-editor of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion. Keel has received fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults community-based movements, human and civil rights organizations, and governments internationally. He is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, The American Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Criminology and Public Policy, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have been published in The NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today. He has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
