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.
