I was sitting in the audience at the Black Feminism 2000 conference in March 2000, when UCLA professor Robin D. G. Kelly, a Black man, told a story about woman named Cherae Williams. Cherae was thirty-seven, Black, and living in the Bronx when she was beaten by her boyfriend. When she called the police for help she was then beaten within an inch of her life by NYPD officers. Though 1999 had been a year of protesting police brutality after NYPD officers shot Amadou Diallo fortyone times in the doorway of his own home, Kelly noted the lack of national attention to Cherae’s case, as well as to police killings of Tyisha Miller in Riverside, California, and LaTanya Haggerty in Chicago that same year. Citing this invisibility as evidence of an absence of gender analysis in the anti–police brutality movement, Kelly emphasized that Black feminism demands action around Black women’s experiences of police violence. On the same panel, Black feminist foremother Barbara Smith, who had been actively organizing around Diallo’s murder, echoed Kelly’s points and expanded on his call to action to include police violence against Black LGBTQ people.1
I immediately set out to learn everything I could about Cherae’s experience. On September 28, 1999, she called 911 during a domestic violence incident.2 When the police arrived, the two white police officers refused even to get out of their patrol car to take her complaint. When Cherae asked for their names and badge numbers, they responded by putting her in handcuffs, shoving her into their patrol car, and driving her to a deserted parking lot.3 Terrified, she managed to get one hand out of the cuffs while in the car, only to be pepper-sprayed in the face by the officers. When they arrived at the lot, the officers pulled her out of the car by her hair, repeatedly shook her, and struck her head against the car. They then beat her so badly they broke her nose, burst her spleen, and fractured her jaw, which later had to be wired shut.4 Cherae testified shortly after the incident before a New York City Council hearing on police responses to domestic violence: “They beat me until I was bloody. . . . They left me there dazed and with a warning. They told me if they saw me on the street, that they would kill me. . . . I called the police to prevent a serious incident, and they brutalized me.”5 For a long time, I opened every presentation with Cherae’s story—consistently drawing gasps of horror—to amplify the voice she raised in protest at that City Council hearing and to point to her experience as a quintessential example of Black women’s vulnerability to both interpersonal and state violence.
A month after the Black Feminism panel, Angela Y. Davis, who has consistently spoken out about her own and other women’s experiences of police violence throughout her activist life, opened the historic founding conference of INCITE! at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with the following story:
Many years ago, when I was a student in San Diego, I was driving down the freeway with a friend when we encountered a black woman wandering along the shoulder. Her story was extremely disturbing. Despite her uncontrollable weeping, we could surmise that she had been raped and dumped along the side of the road. After a while, she was able to wave down a police car, thinking that they would help her. However, when the white policeman picked her up, he did not comfort her, but rather seized upon the opportunity to rape her once more.
I relate this story not for its sensational value, but for its metaphorical power.
Given the racist and patriarchal patterns of the state, it is difficult to envision the state as the holder of solutions to the problem of violence against women of color. However, as the anti-violence movement has been institutionalized and professionalized, the state plays an increasingly dominant role in how we conceptualize and create strategies to minimize violence against women. One of the major tasks of this conference, and of the anti-violence movement as a whole, is to address this contradiction, especially as it presents itself to poor communities of color.6
For me, these two stories—posed as challenges to both the anti–police brutality movement and the antiviolence movement—were foundational. They resonated with my own experiences of police violence when I sought protection, as well as the consistent findings of my research over the past twenty-five years: police violence against women of color takes place disproportionately, and with alarming frequency, in the context of responses to domestic and sexual violence. Similarly, our research for Amnesty International’s 2005 report Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against LGBT People in the United States and for the book Queer (In)Justice made it clear that responses to family, interpersonal, and homophobic and transphobic violence are frequent sites of police violence against LGBTQ people.
At a keynote presentation at the 2006 National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) conference, I told Cherae’s story as a cautionary tale about the consequences of relying on police as the primary, if not exclusive, response to violence against women, notwithstanding challenges raised for decades by women of color to this approach. I concluded a litany of stories and studies by saying, “As a general rule, law and order agendas have never been about protecting us, and, in fact, have led to increased violence against women of color in the home, in the community, and at the hands of law enforcement.” I talked about the call issued by the 2002 “INCITE!—Critical Resistance Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex” and urged the audience to take up its challenge to envision, develop, and pursue responses to violence that do not rely on or produce police violence.
My copresenter, representing Manavi, an organization working with South Asian survivors of violence, issued a similar call for non–law enforcement, community-based responses to violence. She drew attention to the fact that for Manavi’s constituency, law enforcement responses were potentially dangerous on many levels, ranging from potential immigration consequences and failure to protect based on assumptions about South Asian “culture” to arrest of or additional violence against survivors. After our presentation, the room slowly began to empty, a trickle becoming a flood. No one thanked us for our presentation or approached us to engage with us or the content of our talks. We instinctively moved closer and closer together until we were hugging, alone in a conference room full of people who had no desire to hear the message we were delivering. Since then, there has been some progress: dozens of antiviolence coalitions and activists signed on to a submission to the President’s Task Force on 21st-Century Policing focused on women of color’s experiences of policing, and there is growing recognition among antiviolence advocates that police responses to violence—including “mandatory arrest” policies—need to be revisited.7 Nevertheless, much of the mainstream antiviolence movement remains conspicuously silent on the issue of police violence against women of color.
Pulling back the veil reveals that police violence in the context of responses to domestic, sexual, family, homophobic, and transphobic violence takes many forms: verbal abuse, physical violence, and refusal to respond, as in Cherae’s case. Respondents to a 2015 survey of more than nine hundred antiviolence advocates, survivors, and other stakeholders from almost all fifty states undertaken by law professor Julie Goldscheid and her colleagues found that police were sometimes or often demeaning or disrespectful to survivors, did not believe them, or did not take domestic violence or sexual assault seriously.8 Almost a third of respondents said that police sometimes or often used inappropriate force against survivors. They also reported that officers threatened to arrest survivors, particularly if they were called multiple times. Police violence in the context of responses to violence can also include sexual harassment, assault, and abuse, profiling of survivors as perpetrators of violence, arrest or referral to immigration authorities, “outing” of LGBTQ survivors, and loss of housing and children.
In all too many cases, police responses to violence prove deadly to survivors, including many whose stories we don’t yet know.9 For instance, Melissa Ventura, a Latinx mother of three described by her sister as the “heart and soul of her family” and by a neighbor as happy about the recent arrival of her two-month old baby, was killed by police officers responding to a domestic violence call at her home in Yuma, Arizona, in July 2016. Police officers were the only witnesses to the killing, and none have been held accountable.10 On February 18, 2015, Janisha Fonville and her girlfriend, Korneisha Banks, both Black women living in a Charlotte, North Carolina, housing project, had been fighting. Eventually, Banks asked her sister to call the police and left the house. When police responded, she went back to the house with them, where they found Janisha lying on the couch. As Janisha rose from the couch in protest of the police officers’ arrival, one of the officers shot her in the chest, claiming she was lunging at them with a knife. Korneisha says Janisha was empty-handed, and that there was no threat to the officers from the one-hundred-pound woman. Family and friends described Janisha as loving and funny, and as someone who struggled with mental health issues and was trying to manage them.11 They can also prove to be deadly to bystanders such as Yvette Smith or Bettie Jones, women who were killed by officers responding to calls involving other members of their households or neighbors.12 Once brought out of the shadows, these stories require us to shift and expand our responses to violence in all its forms—including police violence.
Police violence against survivors of violence often takes place away from public view, cameras, and cop watchers. Survivors of violence are less likely to be able to speak out, because they need the police to remain willing to respond to future calls for assistance or because of shame, silence, and fear of retaliation. As a result, racial profiling and police brutality in the context of responses to violence remains, quite literally, invisible.
Even when women do come forward, their stories too often go unnoticed by antiviolence and police accountability groups alike. Cases like Cherae’s are often hidden in plain sight, the subject of public testimony or news coverage that meets with little response from anti–police brutality activists because it is perceived as a domestic violence–related problem and thus a women’s issue, not a problem of racial profiling or police violence—a men’s issue. The same year Cherae testified before the New York City Council, a Black woman testified at an Amnesty International hearing on police brutality in Los Angeles to tell her story that officers responding to a “family quarrel” had beaten her in her home until she fainted, while her children were locked outside, powerless to answer their mother’s cries for help. The officers then gagged her and dragged her across her yard to their police car.13 It is telling that neither case became a rallying cry for either antiviolence or anti–police brutality movements.
In addition to engaging in physical violence against survivors, as detailed in chapter 5, officers like Daniel Holtzclaw and Roger Magaña take advantage of their position to prey on survivors when responding to calls for help or when entering private premises without a warrant on the pretense that they believe someone is in danger.14 In a 2006 series on police sexual violence, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported: “A Glenolden, Delaware County, officer was convicted of raping a woman in 2002 after he answered a domestic-dispute call. ‘He had his police uniform on, his gun, his nightstick,’ the woman said. ‘I did exactly what he asked me to do.’”15 A Pennsylvania state trooper who had been convicted of multiple sexual assaults in 2000 explained the underlying dynamics: “I would see women that were vulnerable where I could appear as a knight in shining armor. . . . I’m going to help this woman who’s being abused by her boyfriend, and then I’ll ask for sexual favors.”16
In one particularly infuriating case in Chicago in 2010, Tiawanda Moore called police during a dispute with her boyfriend. As he was trained to do, an officer took her into a private room to take her statement. But instead of doing so, he fondled her breasts, groped her buttocks, and left his number with the suggestion that they “hook up.” She called his supervisor to report him, and met with a lieutenant and internal affairs officer. According to her attorney, Robert Johnson, when she tried to report the assault, internal affairs “gave her the run-around.”17 She demanded that the officer be fired. They prevented her from leaving the room while discouraging her from filing a complaint, among other things referring to the fact that she was a “stripper.” She began recording the conversation on her Blackberry. They charged her with two counts of felony wiretapping, under an Illinois law that says you need the consent of both parties to record a conversation. She spent two weeks in jail and over a year fighting the charges, until she was finally acquitted in 2012.18 The officer who assaulted her was never charged or disciplined. Her experience confirmed the reality for so many survivors of police sexual violence: if you come forward, you are the one who will be put on trial, not the officer responsible. That same year, Tiawanda filed a civil suit against the officer who assaulted her and the city and county officials who let him get away with it.
As in other contexts, sexual violence during domestic-violence calls may take the form of strip searches. For instance, in 2005, a police officer working in a Chicago suburb was charged with official misconduct for making women strip naked when he responded to domestic-violence calls. For trans women, such searches may be the pernicious “gender check.” While litigating Tikkun v. City of New York in the 2000s, a case alleging a pattern and practice within the NYPD of conducting unconstitutional searches to assign gender based on anatomy, a fellow attorney sent me a notice of claim filed against the City of New York in 1999 by Anothai Hansen-Singthong, a Thai transgender woman who called police for protection from her abusive partner. Instead of being protected, she was arrested and strip-searched at the precinct after her abuser told officers she was trans. While I was never able to locate additional information about her case, it always struck me as yet another invisible instance of police violence against a woman of color that came to my attention only by happenstance and never would otherwise have seen the light of day.
Denial of protection is also a form of police violence, and increases vulnerability to other forms of violence by signaling to abusers and bystanders that violence against women of color is acceptable. Explicit or implicit punishment for deviation from, or the inability to meet, racialized gender norms often underlies the denial of police protection. Racial profiling informs not only officers’ perceptions of who is committing violence but also of who is a victim. Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color are defined as inherently existing outside the bounds of womanhood—rendering the status of “good victim” unattainable. This reality is exacerbated and compounded for women of color who are perceived to further deviate from racialized gender norms, transgender and gender-nonconforming women of color; women who use alcohol or controlled substances, and women who are criminalized, such as sex workers. These deviations mark them as unworthy of protection and deserving of arrest in the eyes of law enforcement officers responding to violence.19
More than half the respondents in the service-provider study cited earlier reported anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ perceptions among police officers. They also noted police failure to take seriously violence against young survivors, survivors with mental health issues, drug users, and homeless and low-income survivors, an attitude rooted in perceptions that violence is simply part of an “impoverished or ‘ghetto’ lifestyle.”20 Again and again, study participants noted the ways in which controlling narratives informed police responses to women of color:
Police are much more interested in helping light skinned victims. I think this ties in to their inherent racial bias and ideas about who is a good, deserving victim and who is a troublemaker who brought this violence on. I think that there are especially dangerous stereotypes about assertive black women that the police buy into and keep them from helping black women who are victims of abuse.
My African-American clients seem to be treated worse by police. Police are more likely to suspect them of contributing to the violence or in some other way being at fault for what has happened. They also seem to take claims of black victims less seriously.
The police often assume that if the victim is Native American that she/he has been drinking, thus causing the problem.
Victims of Hispanic/Latina descent are assumed to be lying about the crime to qualify for immigration remedies, even if the victim is a US citizen. . . .
The assumption is [that] Muslim women, South Asian/Arab/Middle Eastern women, aren’t deserving of responses because of the problematic assumptions that equate Muslim women with being oppressed due to their inherent religious identity. . . .
People who don’t speak English are discriminated against. Because they are hard to communicate with, police don’t investigate their cases as thoroughly. They also ignore important protocols (such as separating family members to interview them) because it’s less convenient. Police are also less likely to inform undocumented immigrants of their legal rights.21
Transgender people of color are relentlessly and ruthlessly denied protection by police and often blamed for violence they experience. When researching Stonewalled, we learned of an instance when Los Angeles police responded to a violent assault on an undocumented Latinx transgender street vendor by saying, “If they kill her, call us.”22 We also heard about an incident in which an Asian Pacific transgender woman reported a hate crime to police, who refused to photograph her injuries, telling her, “You’re not a victim of violence. If you didn’t tell people you’re a transsexual, people would leave you alone.”23 Advocates also told us that, where domestic violence against transgender women is concerned, officers often laugh, or say, “You’re a man, too. You can handle yourself,” or “Oh, guys, forget it; this is a man.”24 One young Black trans woman living in Los Angeles repeatedly called police for assistance when her boyfriend was abusive. Each time, despite the visible bruises on her body, officers said that there was nothing they could do. Instead, two undercover officers knocked on her door one morning and told her she was under arrest on an old warrant for a solicitation charge.25
Indeed, trans people are often criminalized rather than protected by police. In one case that prompted a national organizing campaign, CeCe McDonald, a Black transgender woman, was arrested and imprisoned for defending herself against a neo-Nazi who pursued her as she tried to leave after his friend smashed a broken glass into CeCe’s face, lacerating her cheek and a salivary gland. Instead of celebrating her survival, police and prosecutors punished her for it. The moral of the story is that transgender women are treated by police as if they have the right to neither protection nor self-defense.
Lesbians, deemed gender nonconforming by virtue of their existence outside the heteropatriarchy, are also ignored and punished. One survivor interviewed by the Family Violence Project in New York City said that the police “show up and . . . are like . . . dykes, damn it . . . God, they deserve this.”
In 2015, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) reported that 12 percent of the 33 percent of LGBTQ survivors who reported intimate-partner violence to law enforcement said that the police were hostile.26 Among survivors of homophobic or transphobic violence who reported to the police, 39 percent said police were hostile, 33 percent experienced verbal abuse, and 16 percent experienced physical abuse.27 In 2013, 5 percent of LGBTQ survivors of intimate partner violence reported physical violence by police.28 Often, such violence is a manifestation of racialized gender policing. For instance, advocates and survivors alike report that once a transgender woman’s gender identity is discovered by officers responding to a domestic-violence call or is disclosed to them by an abuser, she is treated as if she has deceived the police and punished with violence.
Gender nonconformity in behavior also produces both police violence and exclusion from protection. In one study, survivors of violence who were arrested tended to be using drugs or alcohol, “thus deviating from gender-role prescriptions of appropriate female behavior.”29 Women survivors of violence arrested in Boulder, Colorado, also reported that they believed that use of alcohol was among the top three reasons they had been arrested.30 Similarly, women who are or are perceived to be involved in the sex trades are denied protection: Cyndee Clay, executive director of HIPS, a sex workers’ organization in Washington, DC, has stated that women perceived to be departing from gendered norms of acceptable behavior by engaging in sex work are almost universally subject to dual arrest—in which both parties to a dispute are arrested—when police respond to domestic violence against them. Similar perceptions govern police response to sexual assault, particularly for Black women who are believed to be engaged in the sex trade.31
Despite the constant pathologizing of women who don’t “fight back” against rape and other forms of violence, women who defend themselves are also denied protection by police because their behavior is perceived as a deviation from a gender-normative, defenseless response. In Florida, Marissa Alexander was arrested for firing a warning shot in the air to stop an assault by her abusive husband. As a Black woman, she was already at a disadvantage, more likely to be perceived as violent than as victimized. When, instead of performing victimhood in expected ways—cowering, crying in a corner—she “stood her ground,” Marissa was punished with arrest and was charged with a felony offense carrying a twenty-year prison sentence, even though no one was harmed or even in danger of being harmed by her actions.
Black women who are queer are also more likely to be framed by police as perpetrators rather than victims when they defend themselves. This was glaringly apparent in one case that gained national attention through local organizing, depicted in the award-winning documentary Out in the Night and described in Beth Richie’s Arrested Justice and in Queer (In)Justice. Seven Black lesbians who became known as the New Jersey 7 were out in New York City one hot summer’s night when a man made a lewd comment to one of them. When they responded that they weren’t interested because they were gay, his tone quickly turned violent as he followed them down the street, shouting, “Dyke bitches, lesbian bitches, I’ll fuck you straight, sweetheart!” Then he spat on one of the women, threw a lit cigarette at the group, and climbed on top of another, pulling her hair out at the roots. One of the women, Renata Hill, said that, “With him approaching me in the manner that he was approaching, and saying the things he was saying, basically you’re saying that you’re going to rape me.” The women defended themselves and were walking away when police stopped and arrested them, guns drawn. Initial police radio reports described the incident as minor, involving minimal injuries, “not gang activity.” Yet eventually, based largely on perceptions rooted in the women’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression, things changed.32 As INCITE! and FIERCE! later wrote about the incident,
Police characterized the incident as one of “gang violence” by a group of Black lesbians, rather than as one of homophobic and misogynist sexual and physical violence by a straight man against a group of women. Based in large part on the police version of the events, the media constructed and reinforced identities of “killer lesbians” forming “a seething Sapphic septet,” and a “lesbian wolf pack,” before the courts and prison industrial complex took over their enforcement and punishment. How police responded to and investigated this case drove its ultimate outcome.33
The women were tried, charged, pled guilty or were convicted, and sentenced to periods of up to eleven years in prison. Though eventually all were released on appeal, with the support of a bicoastal campaign to win their freedom, their lives were forever changed. Each had lost years of their freedom, missed the funeral of a loved one, and time with their children and families.
These are only a few instances in which Black women—perceived as gender nonconforming on the basis of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, behavior, or appearance, or some combination thereof—were denied victim status and were criminalized for defending themselves. No Selves to Defend, an exhibit mounted by Mariame Kaba and Rachel Caïdor, catalogues many more,34 and the national coalition #SurvivedandPunished organizes around active cases of survivors of violence penalized for self-defense.35
For these reasons and more, for many women of color, calling on law enforcement for protection is simply not an option. Historical and current realities fuel perceptions of law enforcement agents and the criminal legal system as further threats to women of color’s own safety and that of their families and communities, rather than as sources of protection from violence in the home. More than 80 percent of respondents to the 2015 service-provider survey believed that police relations with communities of color influenced their clients’ willingness to call the police for help.36 Criminalized survivors are particularly reluctant to contact police. Service providers report, “Many of our clients were committing crimes (using illegal substances, participating in sex work, had a taser in their possession, etc.) while they were being abused. Clients are afraid of being prosecuted for those crimes while their abusers go free.”37
Historic and current state violence against Native women renders many Native women reluctant to call on law enforcement for assistance when facing violence in their communities. Even when Native women do seek assistance from police, they are often disbelieved based on stereotypes focused on actual or perceived alcohol use. Vulnerability to violence is further compounded for Native women living on reservations who remain almost completely unprotected due to restrictions that prevent tribal law enforcement from exercising jurisdiction over felony cases or cases involving non-Natives. This leaves pursuit of abusers to federal law enforcement agencies, who frequently fail to adequately investigate and prosecute crimes against Native women.38
For undocumented women, reliance on the state for protection can have devastating consequences. This is especially true in border states such as California, Texas, and Arizona, where Border Patrol agents often ride with local law enforcement agents, as well as in the increasing number of jurisdictions where local law enforcement agents have been deputized to enforce federal immigration laws. According to one 2003 study of Vietnamese immigrants living in Houston, survivors of violence call the police at one-fifth the rate of other ethnic groups, regardless of immigration status, due to fear of problems with immigration authorities and racial or ethnic discrimination by law enforcement.39
And given high levels of police violence and denial of protection to transgender people, it is not surprising that more than half of respondents to the 2015 US Transgender Survey said they would feel uncomfortable asking the police for help if they needed it. Middle Eastern, Black, and multiracial respondents, as well as people living with disabilities and people living in poverty, were most likely to feel uncomfortable seeking assistance from police.40
“Mandatory” and “pro-arrest” policies all too often contribute to the criminalization of women’s efforts to prevent and avoid violence, and to defend themselves and their children and families. Far from eliminating the effects of police discretion in responding to domestic violence, such policies simply mandate an arrest, leaving police with the discretion to determine who to arrest, with predictable results.41 Of particular concern has been the growing numbers of arrests of survivors of violence under such policies.42 Joan Zorza, a longtime advocate for survivors of violence, concludes that, at their worst, mandatory arrest policies “may be utilized as a weapon to exploit and further victimize battered women.”43
In 1995, following the adoption of mandatory arrest policies, 14.3 percent of domestic-violence arrests in Los Angeles were of women, double the rate of the previous five years. Overall arrests for domestic violence increased under mandatory arrest policies between 1987 and 1995, but three times as many women were arrested in 1995 as in 1987, compared to less than twice as many men.44 In Maryland, the number of women arrested for domestic violence tripled between 1992 and 1996, and in Sacramento the number of women arrested for domestic violence increased 91 percent between 1991 and 1996.45 In 2001, feminist researcher Susan Miller reported that in some cities, over 20 percent of those arrested following domestic-violence complaints were women. She concluded: “An arrest policy intended to protect battered women as victims is being misapplied and used against them. Battered women have become female offenders.”46 In 2000, a study of domestic-violence survivors under New York State’s mandatory arrest policies found that, over a two-and-a-half year period, survivors of domestic violence had been arrested in 27 percent of cases received through a domestic-violence hotline.47 Eighty-five percent of survivors who were arrested had a prior documented record of being subjected to domestic violence, and 85 percent were injured during the incident that led to their arrest.48 Arrests of survivors are particularly common in police responses to incidents of violence involving two people perceived to be of the same gender. According to a 2010 NCAVP report, incidents of “misarrest” of LGBTQ people increased 144 percent from 2008 to 2009.49 In 2015, misarrests of survivors increased to 31 percent, from the 17 percent reported in 2014.50
There are several scenarios in which survivors are revictimized by mandatory arrest policies. Sometimes, responding officers are unable to or don’t try to (or simply can’t be bothered to) discern which party is the primary aggressor and opt to arrest both parties to a domestic dispute. Other times, notwithstanding often lengthy histories of being subjected to violence, survivors are deemed by arresting officers to be the aggressor because they acted in self-defense. And still other times, the survivor ends up in handcuffs because the abuser, familiar with and able to manipulate the legal system, called the police first. One Los Angeles case is typical: a Middle Eastern woman who endured her husband’s abuse for over a decade and finally bit him during a struggle was arrested by officers called by neighbors.51 In another, Dariela, a Honduran immigrant, was arrested when her abusive partner, Maria, called the police. Dariela later said, “But that is how the law is. . . . She is American, and I did not speak English, and I am an immigrant; things went bad for me.” Chicana studies professor Martha Escobar concluded that for Dariela, “her undocumented status, inability to speak English, and sexuality [were] all factors constructed as deviant.”52
Thus, profiling doesn’t stop when the police shift from enforcers to “protectors”: who is perceived as a legitimate victim and who is perceived as violent is deeply racially gendered. Police officers’ responses to calls for help are informed by controlling narratives of women and gender-nonconforming people of color as violent, threatening, and incapable of being raped or abused and complicit in the violence perpetrated against them. Officers implementing mandatory arrest policies thus engage in racialized gender profiling by arresting the person who is of color, is more gender nonconforming, is an immigrant, or speaks limited English. Consequently, it is not surprising that the impacts of survivor arrests appear to fall disproportionately on low-income women of color. A significant majority (66 percent) of survivors of violence in the New York City study who had been arrested along with their abusers (dual arrest) or arrested as a result of a complaint lodged by their abuser (retaliatory arrest) were African American or Latinx.53 Fortythree percent were living below the poverty line, and 19 percent were receiving public assistance at the time.54 As noted earlier, studies have also found that survivors of violence are also more likely to be arrested if they were under the influence of alcohol or controlled substances at the time of police response, fought back against their abuse, were engaged or perceived to be engaged in sex work, or are transgender or gender nonconforming in appearance.
Arrest of survivors under mandatory arrest policies subjects people who have already been targets of violence in their families, homes, and communities to further violence, this time at the hands of the state. The retraumatization experienced when survivors of violence are arrested when police respond to a domestic-violence call is predictable. One survivor who was subject to a mandatory arrest said she “got arrested like two times. . . . That’s traumatizing. . . . The police officer . . . he pushed me inside the car! He pushed me inside, ‘Tell that to the judge!’ He sees me crying and trembling and stuff. He just pushed me . . . ‘Shut up back there!!’ And I was crying. I said, ‘It’s not fair’ . . . ‘Shut up!!’ . . . He pulled me out of the car. . . . He pushed me against [a desk].”55
Such arrests also have devastating collateral consequences in terms of immigration status, losing children, access to employment, denial of benefits, being pushed further into criminalized survival economies, and increased vulnerability to violence. For immigrant women, the consequences of mandatory arrest policies can be doubly devastating in the context of ever-increasing collaboration between immigration enforcement and local law enforcement authorities, described in chapter 2. Many undocumented women have reported cases of sexual and domestic violence only to find themselves deported after being arrested under mandatory arrest policies or subject to inquiries into their immigration status by law enforcement officers.56
The Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives initially arose out of a solidarity march with Ferguson in the wake of the murder of Mike Brown in August 2014. Since then it has largely focused on demanding accountability for the killing of Aura Rain Rosser, an artist and mother of three killed by Ann Arbor police three months later. Officers David Ried and Mark Raab responded to a domestic violence call at Aura’s house.57 Claiming that Aura caused them to fear for their safety as she walked toward them from fifteen feet away holding a four-inch knife, officers made no effort to deescalate the situation or give her an opportunity to drop the knife. Instead, five to ten seconds after arriving, they shot her. The officers and city officials retroactively justified the shooting by saying that Aura “opened her eyes very wide,” “appeared to be in a deranged state,” and had “a blank stare,” echoing the justifications offered by the officers who killed Michelle Cusseaux months earlier, and drawing on historic depictions of Black women as congenitally deranged, superhuman, and posing an inherent threat.
“A People’s Retort” to the prosecutor’s report in the case draws parallels between justifications offered for Aura’s shooting with Darren Wilson’s characterization of Mike Brown as a “demon,” using racist tropes to transform Aura into a mortal threat rather than a woman in the midst of “an angry dispute with her ex-boyfriend.”58 Local organizer and scholar-activist Austin McCoy notes the multiple dynamics at play in both Aura’s death and the state’s response: “The crucial difference is that Rosser is black and female. Being black and female in America today means that black women not only die at the hands of the state like men, their suffering is obscured while making their physicality and their psychological state hypervisible. Black women’s suffering is unseen by authorities, but the state tries to highlight how they are ‘aggressive’ and ‘hysterical.’”59
The organizing around Aura’s case highlights a welcome expansion in the movement for police accountability compared to the relative silence around Cherae Williams’s case fifteen years earlier. Rosser’s image is one of many circulating in cyberspace under the Black Lives Matter hashtag, her death is the motivation for marches drawing thousands, her name is invoked alongside Brown’s at rallies, demonstrations, and vigils across the country.
When longtime antiviolence activist Mariame Kaba first read a New York Times article about Tiawanda Moore, she was shocked that she hadn’t known earlier about her case, which took place in Chicago, where Kaba was living. Kaba immediately mobilized the Chicago Task Force on Women and Girls to raise awareness about Tiawanda on social media, to campaign for since-deposed prosecutor Anita Alvarez to drop the charges, and to pack the courtroom with supporters throughout Tiawanda’s trial. Kaba never forgot the case, later playing a leadership role in the campaign to remove Alvarez as district attorney during the 2016 election under the hashtag #ByeAnita. Kaba’s organizing around Tiawanda’s case was consistent with Angela Davis’s call fifteen years earlier at the 2000 INCITE! conference: to recognize and organize from a place that makes visible survivors’ vulnerability to both state and interpersonal violence.
Survived and Punished, cofounded by Kaba, is among the organizations that have taken up the case of Ky Peterson, a Black trans man raped as he walked home from a convenience store in Americus, Georgia, in 2011. Ky defended himself, killing his attacker. Based on prior experiences, he didn’t think he would be believed by police, so he concealed the body and hoped for the best. His instincts were right—when police eventually did get involved, they didn’t see Ky as a victim, despite evidence from a rape kit that supported his version of events. Instead police pursued theories involving consensual sex and robbery that ultimately forced Ky to enter a guilty plea in an effort to avoid a lifetime of imprisonment. He was sentenced to twenty years. Chase Strangio of the ACLU concludes, “What this case highlights is how difficult it is for trans people of color to claim the status of victim.”60
Beyond organizing around individual cases, these realities require us to acknowledge that racial profiling and police violence take place not just in street and traffic stops, but also when police respond to complaints of violence. Community efforts by anti–police brutality and antiviolence groups to document and redress violence should therefore explicitly include police violence that takes place in the context of responses to violence. Additionally, cop-watch groups need to support domestic-violence survivors in safely documenting their own experiences of policing and exposing police violence in these contexts.
Perhaps most importantly, Black women’s and women of color’s experiences of police responses to violence demand that we radically rethink our visions of safety, including by ending mandatory arrest policies and developing responses to violence that don’t involve the police. Some in the mainstream antiviolence movement have already started down this road. In March 2016, I found myself, to my great surprise, at a gathering convened by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice, Detention, and Prevention to discuss ending mandatory arrest policies in the context of responses to family violence involving girls, which are among the primary drivers of girls’ arrest and incarceration.61 Perhaps if this had been achieved in Kentucky, Gynnya McMillen, who died in custody after being arrested following a dispute with her mother, would still be with us today. In June 2016, the New York City Council Young Women’s Initiative recommended the establishment of a task force to consider the repeal of mandatory arrest policies in one of the first cities that adopted them. The initiative also advocated for programs that would empower women to prevent, avoid, and leave violence, including increased access to housing, employment, and health care, and legalizing their immigration status. By investing in the needs of communities and survivors, the goal is to reduce police responses to violence and support alternative approaches to advancing safety of young women and girls.62
Some organizations have been laying the groundwork for community-based responses to violence: Communities Against Rape and Abuse and Sista II Sista both wrote powerful pieces in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology detailing their experiments. Creative Interventions, Gen 5, Harm Free Zones, and the Audre Lorde Project Safe Outside the System Project have all piloted, practiced, and reflected on how we respond to violence without police. Many of the lessons learned are highlighted in the Creative Interventions’ Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence, inspiring newer formations, like the Dream Defenders, and others to follow in their footsteps.63 Ultimately, the experiences described in this chapter, along with countless others, counsel strongly in favor of a critical examination of current approaches to violence against women, and the development and support of alternative, community-based accountability strategies that prioritize safety for survivors; community responsibility for creating, enabling, and eliminating the climates that allow violence to happen; and the transformation of private and public relations of power.
The Critical Resistance–INCITE! statement calls on movements concerned with ending police violence and violence against women to “develop community based responses to violence that do not rely on the criminal legal system AND which have mechanisms that ensure safety and accountability for survivors of domestic and sexual violence.”64 Such responses are essential if we are to move away from reliance on law enforcement–based approaches to violence; achieve true safety for survivors of domestic violence; and, ultimately, end violence against women of color in all its forms.
* This chapter is based in part on a draft chapter written with Beth E. Richie in 2010.