Overview

Every day in the United States, an average of three people are killed by police officers. Black and Indigenous victims are disproportionately represented, and their stories are too often distorted by courts and media to justify their deaths and exonerate police actions. In Complex Innocence, Lisa Marie Cacho examines five police killings that occurred between 2012 and 2019 across the continental U.S., Hawaiʻi, and the Muckleshoot Nation. Many of the victims – queer people, women of color, and other multiply marginalized individuals – had prior encounters with law enforcement, leading their deaths to be framed as deserved or inevitable. Cacho challenges these narratives by interrogating the legal, cultural, and historical frameworks that determine which acts of self-defense are protected and which are criminalized. Drawing on self-defense law, Supreme Court cases, anti-resisting arrest statutes, and policing practices, Cacho reveals how ""self-defense"" as a right has been repeatedly redefined to privilege police officers while denying protection to victims of state violence. Through careful analysis of reports, testimonies, and media portrayals, she demonstrates how people of color's efforts at self-preservation are recast as threats, while officers' violence is framed as justifiable. By reclaiming the complex innocence of those killed, Complex Innocence exposes the racial, sexual, and colonial foundations of policing. It offers an urgent critique of how U.S. law and culture sustain the cycle of sanctioned state violence.

Full Product Details

9781479836567

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Powerful, stark, and beautifully written, Lisa Cacho's Complex Innocence considers how the presumption of innocence--and its refusal--functions legally, culturally, and politically within militarized police brutality against Black, Brown, and Indigenous victims. With Indigenous dispossession centered as a structuring rationale for the racial, gendered, and colonial production of policing self-defence, Cacho painstakingly, and with brilliant grace, demonstrates how innocence is denied victims of police killings. Cacho confronts the fullness of the lives lost in their deadly encounter with police, and in each case study, offers us possible otherwises against structures of harm. This book is a must read to understand the exacting cruelty of US policing, compliance, and law."" - Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw Nation), author of Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism  ""Complex Innocence is simultaneously a radical storytelling, archival close reading, and counter-interrogation of U.S. policing. Lisa Marie Cacho raises the stakes of critical cultural analysis by purposing it toward a rigorous, activist-intellectual interpretation of law and the state, reframing jurisprudence as an insidious extension of police power. This is a book about stories at war with each other: Complex Innocence honors those targeted and stolen by deadly state violence by centering their testimonies, grounded analyses, and historical truth-telling as dynamic sites of knowledge production that resist and confound institutionalized erasure."" - Dylan Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside

Author Information

Lisa Marie Cacho is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Social Death: Racialized Rightless and the Criminalization of the Unprotected

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