Black and Brown People In Law-Enforcement Keep Getting Changed By The System Before They Can Change It

Kyren Lacy's death following DA John Belton's public vilification of him is just the latest heartbreaking and enraging result

Hi Thursday etc.!

First: My apologies to those of you who are getting this story twice - I accidentally only sent it to paid subscribers the first time, so if you’re getting it again, thank you so much for being a paid subscriber! Enjoy the story again! And I will have one just for you up next! Sorry!

I’m now getting right to Meeka’s story because it’s relatively timely and absolutely important. I'll just preface it by showing you the note she sent me yesterday (which she said was OK for me to show you - we are all pretty openbooked with each other around here, which I love and appreciate).

I got this last night from our wonderful writer Meeka, who you may already know and love:

Hey Jane,

Today brought another round: a white-passing Latino called my child the N-word after he stood up for another student who was being harassed and called a “Black asshole.”

So with that going on, and this news about Kyren Lacy heavy on my mind, I felt compelled to draft this piece. It’s raw, but it’s real. Let me know what you think. The full draft is below.

-Meeka

I hope you get as much from this piece as I did and let's talk about it in the comments. I love you all.

Jane

PS It is still just me here today, but when something makes me mad and inspired like this, I start editing right there at the dinner table. (I know a lot of you writers write the same way - like it's urgent.) Sorry, Dan! First things first.

By Maliyka A. “Meeka” Muhammad

In 2025, as many Black and Brown people say they want to join the legal system to bring change from within, history keeps showing us that the system changes them long before they ever change it. District Attorney John Belton, a Black man, is a prime example. He allowed a system to vilify another Black man, Kyren Lacy, publicly. And now, as he prepares to leave office, not seeking re-election, I can only say… good, because he is not a savior. He is part of the problem. Just as guilty as the officer who lied, as the woman who caused the crash, and as every official who helped build the false narrative that ended a man’s life. He had power and chose not to wield it for the sake of truth or justice.

When I read that the Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill would now be conducting an independent investigation into the Kyren Lacy case, my first thought wasn’t gratitude. It was disbelief. Because this announcement came only after Belton’s own investigation, prompted by enormous public outrage, confirmed what many already knew: that Kyren Lacy was innocent and that there had been a cover-up. That it took another layer of government oversight to reexamine what should have been handled correctly from the start shows exactly why people have no faith in the justice system.

Belton’s office had been preparing to take the case before a grand jury when Kyren died by suicide. Kyren’s name should have been cleared while he was alive. Instead, he became yet another Black man publicly accused, stripped of dignity, and left to bear the unbearable weight of being wrongfully painted as a monster. His death in April wasn’t just a personal tragedy; it was the system’s final act of violence. By the time talk of an “independent investigation” surfaced, the public had already done what the justice system refused to do: see that something wasn’t right.

Let’s be honest: people were questioning this case long before Kyren’s death. Black people in particular were sounding the alarm. We’ve seen this story before. We’ve lived this story before. The script is too familiar: a young Black man accused of something heinous, the media rushes to convict him in headlines, and the state, through its police, prosecutors, and grand juries, follows suit. Then, only when it’s too late, comes the performance of remorse, the statements about “independent review” and “commitment to transparency.”

But transparency after death isn’t justice. It’s PR.

And John Belton, no matter how he tries to reframe it, is not blameless. You don’t get to build the fire and then show up with a glass of water, acting like a hero because you tried to put out the flames. You don’t get to destroy someone’s life and then wash your hands of the blood when the system you fed kills him. What happened to Kyren Lacy is not an isolated mistake; it is part of a larger, deliberate pattern of how this system operates.

A protest I attended holding a sign I made listing names of Black people who were murdered by the police including Shu’aib Abdul-Latif a childhood friend. This was photographed on April 29, 2015 in Union Square in Manhattan.

Legal scholars have described it as one of the most profound moral failures in American history. The Syracuse Law Review describes how innocent Black defendants are wrongfully convicted at disproportionate rates and spend years in prison before being exonerated. Those convictions don’t just destroy individuals; they devastate families and entire communities. Every wrongful conviction creates two victims: the person who suffered the original crime and the person wrongfully accused of it.

Earlier this year, the Equal Justice Initiative published data confirming what Black America has known all along: wrongful conviction is a public health crisis. The National Registry of Exonerations found that Black Americans are seven times more likely to be falsely convicted of serious crimes, seven and a half times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder, and, in prior analyses, nearly nineteen times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug crimes.

This isn’t random. It’s racial architecture.

The system functions correctly. It performs exactly as intended. It punishes Blackness with precision, then dares to call itself blind.

We all know someone who was wrongfully convicted and enslaved in the prison system.

People wonder why there is such a loud, persistent outcry to defund the police, to dismantle prisons, and to abolish the criminal justice system altogether. It is not because we believe crime doesn’t exist or that those who harm others should go unpunished. It is because we have seen, generation after generation, that the scales of justice are not just unbalanced, they are deliberately weighted against us.

The punishment of Black people far outweighs that of white people for the same offenses. The evidence is everywhere. These systems were never designed to reform anything. They were built to preserve labor, to monetize Black bodies, “slavery by another name”. They were built to decrease the Black population, to criminalize our existence, to manage our numbers under the guise of law and order. It is a form of eugenics dressed up as justice.

Our legal system still functions as a modern plantation, one where freedom and justice are rationed according to color, power, and convenience.

That’s why we say tear the whole system down because we know its roots. Because we have watched it regenerate itself after every so-called reform. Because those of us who have seen our loved ones swallowed by it know the truth: it is not broken, it is functioning exactly as it was designed.

Just as I know individuals who were wrongfully convicted and enslaved in the prison system, I know that others know someone, too. None of us is far removed from the devastation. We all know someone who’s been taken.

Me participating in a die-in protest at Grand Central Station in 2014, following the court decision not to indict the NYPD officers responsible for Eric Garner’s death.AP photo by John Minchillo, cropped by me.

That’s why I found Matthew Ory’s statement (Kyren’s attorney) so hard to read. His long, poetic defense of Belton’s actions may have been well-intentioned. Still, it carried that same paternalistic tone we’ve heard a thousand times, a white man telling Black people to calm down, to stop being angry, to show grace for a system that’s never shown us any.

Let me be clear: Black people have every right to be furious. Every right to question. Every right to hold the entire system accountable, from the cops who lie, to the DAs who enable them, to the judges who let it all slide. Because this isn’t just about one person’s bad judgment, it’s about how law enforcement, prosecutors, and courts conspire, knowingly or not, to preserve each other’s power, even when it costs innocent lives.

People like Ory want to make Belton’s late moral awakening the story. But the real story is the timing. Because Kyren didn’t die when the District Attorney finally decided to call for an investigation, he died in April after months of being dragged through the mud, right before Belton’s office was set to appear before the grand jury. After knowing that even with the truth on his side, the system would rather bury him than admit it was wrong.

And to add salt to this visceral open wound is the Louisiana State Police’s recent update, telling the public, especially those of us who are rightfully angry:

“Following the crash, Louisiana State Police conducted a detailed investigation with the assistance of crash reconstruction experts and all available information at the time. The investigative findings were reviewed in consultation with the Lafourche Parish District Attorney’s Office to determine the appropriate charges. The findings were then presented to the 17th Judicial District Court, which approved an arrest warrant for Lacy, who was awaiting a grand jury hearing.

While we recognize that external narratives may arise, often based on selective information, we urge the public to rely on the full body of facts.”

To that I say... GO TO HELL. Stop playing games with us using these gaslighting techniques. The bottom line is that your officer lied. Where is the statement indicating that he was immediately arrested for making a false statement? Where is the statement that the real perpetrator of that fatal accident has been charged? Miss us with this mockery, this PR-scripted nonsense, this insult to our intelligence.

And that’s what makes this unbearable. We are continually asked to have faith in a system that repeatedly shows us it was never built for us.

A street mural on Fulton Street in front of Restoration Plaza, Brooklyn NY, taken by me July 15, 2020

If you know your history, you know this isn’t new. Remember the Jena Six, the group of Black teenagers in Louisiana who were wrongfully charged and over-prosecuted after a white student was injured in a school fight that followed the hanging of nooses from a tree. Remember the Central Park Five, five Black and Latino boys in New York who were coerced into false confessions and vilified by the media before being exonerated years later. Remember Kalief Browder, a teenager who spent three years in Rikers Island without a trial and later took his own life after the charges were dropped. Remember the police killings after Hurricane Katrina, when Black people were treated like looters instead of survivors. Each story is different, yet the pattern is the same. The criminalization of Black existence has always been the point. Kyren’s story didn’t happen in isolation. It happened in the same soil that has been watered with Black grief for generations.

So no, this isn’t about one DA. It’s about the entire machine, the state police who manipulate evidence, the prosecutors who chase convictions instead of truth, and the judges who pretend not to see the rot that runs through their courtrooms. It’s about how the legal system still functions as a modern plantation, one where freedom and justice are rationed according to color, power, and convenience.

And I’ll say this to anyone who feels uncomfortable reading that: good because discomfort is where truth begins.

We can mourn Kyren Lacy and still demand accountability from everyone who played a role in his demise. We can say his name without sanitizing what happened. We can be heartbroken and enraged.

Because until there’s a system that values Black life before it’s lost, justice will keep showing up late after the funeral, after the hashtags, after the damage is irreversible.