Antiblack violence is not universal---Black women are at disproportionate rates of harm from police, domestic violence and death.

Black women are disproportionately at risk for domestic violence, sexual abuse, and death at the hands of family members, partners, and people they know. A 2014 Time magazine article revealed that they are almost three times more likely to experience death as a result of domestic violence than are white women. While they comprise only 7 percent of the population, Black women make up 22 percent of domestic violence homicides.61 In fact, a leading cause of death of African American women ages 15-34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner.62 Even when Black women do turn to the police for support, they often fail to secure safety from their abusive partners. More disturbingly, an alarming number of police killings of Black women take place in the context of police responses to domestic violence situations.63 Similarly, Black women’s experiences of sexual or homophobic and transphobic violence—leading to the deaths of at least 10 transgender women nationally in the first few months of 2015 alone and a total of at least 12 deaths in 2014 – have failed to result in protection or prevention.64 The reflexive criminalization of Black women seems at times to heighten the perception that they are threatening, foreclosing the possibility in police officers’ minds that they are simply survivors of violence. Black women survivors of violence—and particularly poor, lesbian, gender-nonconforming, and transgender Black women—find that police responses to violence all too often result in further, and sometimes deadly, violence against them. Meagan Hockaday March 28, 2015 / Oxnard, California A police officer fatally shot 26-year-old mother Meagan Hockaday when responding to a domestic dispute. Within 20 seconds of entering her home, the officer fatally shot Hockaday, who he claimed was advancing toward him with a knife drawn. Hockaday had three young children who were all in the house when the incident occurred. The official investigation into this case is ongoing.65 Janisha Fonville February 18, 2015 / Charlotte, North Carolina Janisha Fonville was shot to death by a Charlotte police officer who was responding to a domestic violence complaint involving Fonville and her girlfriend. The officer, who had previously been involved in questionable shootings, claimed that Fonville lunged at him with a knife.66 Her girlfriend, the only other person on the scene, maintains that Fonville was over six feet away from officers, and stood a mere five feet tall, posing no direct threat to the 22 23 officer who shot her. Neighbors questioned why officers could not have used nonlethal force to subdue her.67 Aura Rosser November 9, 2014 / Ann Arbor, Michigan When Aura Rosser’s boyfriend called the police to his apartment over a domestic dispute, Rosser was fatally shot upon their arrival. Police later claimed she had attacked them with a knife, compelling them to use deadly force. Her boyfriend contradicted them, telling reporters, “It doesn’t make any sense … me and her, we had an argument. Glass was being broke, so I called the police to escort her out … the police said ‘police,’ so I stopped. She walked towards them. They said ‘freeze’ and the next thing I know I heard [gunshots].” One officer shot Rosser while the other attempted to use a Taser to subdue her. Rosser suffered from addiction and mental health issues, but her sister disputes that she was a threat to the police. “She would have fainted at the sight of the gun being drawn on her. She would have been extremely docile, no aggression whatsoever towards police.” The officer who shot Rosser was not charged with her death, but her family is moving forward with a civil suit.68 Yvette Smith February 16, 2014 / Bastrop County, Texas Police officers arrived at 47-year-old Yvette Smith’s home in response to a domestic disturbance complaint between two men in the household. Smith, a single mother of two, opened the door for the officers and was shot almost immediately in the head and the stomach. The officers first alleged that Smith had a gun, but that claim was retracted the next day. Deputy Daniel Willis, who fatally shot Smith, has been indicted for murder.69 Along with cisgender and heterosexual Black women, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming Black women have been largely absent from the discourse around racist state violence. The overlap of sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia place Black LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming people in a precarious position at the intersection of constructs around gender, race, and sexuality, fueling police violence against them.70 For instance, police often punish actual or perceived sexual or gender nonconformity with physical and sexual violence. These acts are sometimes accompanied by homophobic, transphobic, and/or misogynist slurs like “dyke ass bitch,” or assertions that if they want to “act like a man” they will be “treated like a man,” or threats to “rape them straight.”71 In one particularly egregious case, a Black lesbian in Atlanta reported being raped by a police officer who told her that the world needed “one less dyke.”72 Profiling of Black transgender women, along with Black non-transgender women for prostitution-related offenses is rampant, sometimes based on the mere presence or possession of a condom.73 Black transgender women and gender-nonconforming women are also routinely subjected to transphobic verbal harassment and abuse, unlawful and degrading searches to assign gender based on anatomical features, and dangerous placement in police custody. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 38 percent of Black transgender people who had interactions with police reported harassment, 14 percent reported physical assault, and 6 percent reported sexual assault.74