This book began with the killing of George Floyd by cops in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the spring of 2020. It is fitting, then, that it ends more or less there, too. Instead, however, of the immediate particular circumstances of George Floyd’s murder— the knee in his back, the violent disinterest of Derek Chauvin and his coworker accomplices on the scene, or the pleas of bystanders, with their mobile phone cameras rolling, to the police to stop, to allow George Floyd to breathe— I end on what came next, as the world was confronted yet again with the painfully familiar image of the police violence of racial capitalism: a Black man killed by the state.

As this book has argued, described, and demonstrated, over the previous seven chapters, there is ample opportunity to find some criminological and sociological truth in the image, and in the ways in which we produce and employ and understand it. Images constitute and condition the social worlds of crime, harm, and justice, and we live our lives more or less immersed in their spectacle. But when George Floyd died the world did not just ‘see it happen’: George Floyd’s killing, like those before it, is not simply seen in the footage of his murder, it is felt. It is not only images of a police murder that are produced when the cameras roll, it is the sounds of a murder. It is George Floyd’s dying plea for his mother, or 26- year- old Daniel Shaver begging in a hotel corridor for clear instruction seconds before being hit five times with shots from Mesa, Arizona cop Phillip Brailsford’s AR- 15 rifle, on which Brailsford had carefully inscribed ‘you’re fucked’ in an ornate script. Seeing George Floyd with his face on the pavement, or Daniel Shaver pressed against the drab hotel carpet, we feel some fraction of their distress and the tactile experience of their last moments. Watching these videos a second, third, fourth time, some of us taste bile and rage rising in our throats. In the wake of their deaths, people go to the streets, where they smell and taste and feel tear gas and pepper spray and hear sirens and bullhorns, gunshots and explosions.