Complex Innocence: Defending Defiant Victims of Police Killings - Hardcover

Cacho, Lisa Marie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1479836567 ISBN 13: 9781479836567

Publisher: NYU Press, 2026

Synopsis

Exposes the paradox of self-defense in police violence through five case studies of police killings

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 were queer people, women of color, and other multiply marginalized individuals who 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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1479836567
• ISBN 13: 9781479836567
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256