How Autopsies Can Hide Police Violence — What Dr. Terence Keel Wants You to Know

Short answer: In a police-involved death, an autopsy isn’t a neutral measurement — it’s an interpretation, often written by an office tied to the same system being investigated. Records can be redacted or frozen on “security holds,” and forensic language can quietly shift blame onto the person who died. That’s how, on paper, police violence can disappear.

Most of us picture an autopsy as the one hard fact in a chaotic story: a body, a cause of death, a number. But UCLA professor Dr. Terence Keel sat down with Big O, Big El, and Krush to explain the part of the criminal-justice system almost nobody watches — the Medical Examiner’s office — and why the “hard fact” is softer, and more political, than we’ve been led to believe.

An autopsy is an interpretation, not just a measurement

Keel draws a line most people never think about: the difference between forensic science and forensic medicine. Science can tell you what’s physically in a body. Forensic medicine is the human act of deciding what those findings mean — what to call the cause of death, what to emphasize, what to leave out. That determination is a judgment call, and judgment calls carry the assumptions of whoever makes them. So the question isn’t only “what happened to this person,” it’s “who got to write it down, and who do they work for?”

How the record gets buried: redactions and “security holds”

In police-involved deaths, Keel explains, autopsy records can be redacted or placed on what’s called a “security hold” — effectively freezing the document so families and the public can’t see it. The reasons offered sound procedural, but the effect is simple: the one record that could clarify how someone died in custody becomes unavailable at exactly the moment it matters most. The conversation runs from the George Floyd case to what Keel calls the “medieval dungeons” of the LA County jail system, and into the John Horton III case — a real example of autopsy discrepancies where a family had to fight for its own answers.

When the language blames the victim

Beyond hiding a record, the wording of one can do quiet work. Medical language can be used to move responsibility onto the person who died — pre-existing conditions, “excited delirium,” a heart that was going to give out anyway. None of that is necessarily a lie. But when the framing consistently points away from the people holding someone down and toward the body on the table, the official story writes itself. Keel’s point isn’t that every examiner is corrupt; it’s that a record produced inside the system rarely indicts the system.

Why Dr. Keel says medical examiners should be elected

His proposed fix is structural. Right now, most medical examiners are appointed — often answerable to the very governments and law-enforcement agencies whose deaths they investigate. Keel argues the office should be elected, accountable directly to the public instead of to the people it’s meant to scrutinize. He also points to a striking shift: “crowd-sourced” data is now surfacing in-custody deaths the government never reported, meaning the public is starting to build the record the official system left blank.

The takeaway

An autopsy in a police-involved death is only as trustworthy as the independence of the person writing it. When the author is tied to the system on trial, the report itself becomes a place where accountability can quietly go missing. You don’t have to assume bad faith to want the record pulled out of that conflict of interest — you just have to know the conflict is there. Now you do.

Guest: Dr. Terence Keel is an award-winning UCLA professor with a joint appointment in African American Studies and the Institute for Society and Genetics, and founder of the BioCritical Studies Lab. His book The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence examines how death investigations classify — and often obscure — police-involved fatalities.

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