Terence Keel
It’s our pleasure to be working with Dr. Terence Keel on his book, The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence, published by Beacon Press on November 11, 2025.
Terence Keel is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles where he works in the Department of African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. His teaching, research, and community engagement are concerned with abolishing discrimination within our society. For the last decade Terence has become an outspoke critic of how racism haunts science, public policy, art, and even our religious beliefs. He is an award winning author, public speaker, activist, and Founding Director of the Lab for BioCritical Studies—an interdisciplinary space committed to studying how discrimination, inequality, and resilience are embodied in human and nonhuman life. Terence is also the Advisor for Structural Competency and Innovation for the UCLA Simulation Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine.
The Coroner's Silence:
Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
For readers of His Name Is George Floyd and Under the Skin
A landmark investigation into forensic medicine that exposes the systematic concealment of state-sanctioned violence through death investigations
Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner’s Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these cases: coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.
Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims’ families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.
The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.
True accountability 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 crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.
