'Black and Missing' attempts a much-needed reform of true-crime storytelling. It mostly succeeds.
In March 2014, 8-year-old Relisha Rudd, who had been living with her family at a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., went missing. The second-grader was last seen alive on the day of her disappearance: Cameras caught her entering a motel room with 51-year-old Kahlil Tatum, a janitor at the shelter who had served long stints in prison. Tatum had been considered a family friend by Rudd's mother, Shamika Young, who called him a "godfather" and had allowed the little girl to spend time with the older man on public outings and at his home, including overnight.
Tatum was eventually presumed by the police to have killed his wife and some days later himself, and Rudd was never found. Her case - compounded in tragedy by Young's own troubled and unstable childhood in the foster-care system - was assiduously covered by the local media but hardly registered on the national consciousness. Gabby Petito-style news coverage has traditionally been reserved for girls and women who look like Gabby Petito, and Rudd did not.
Rudd's disappearance is one of several explored in the HBO docuseries "Black and Missing." Part of a steady drip of programming attempting to reform the fire hose of true-crime entertainment, the two-night, four-part series profiles the sisters-in-law founders of the Maryland-based Black and Missing organization - and attests to why their work of circulating the names, photos and identifying details of Black missing people is regrettably necessary.
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True crime, as we know it today, is a White genre, focusing overwhelmingly on White victims and White perpetrators, with a tendency to ally with law enforcement and uphold the prison-industrial complex. That gives its consumers a distorted sense of the world, as the factors that lead to missing girls and women - poverty, mental illness, domestic violence and police indifference - disproportionately impact Black (and Native) Americans.
One of the primary aims of the docuseries is to redirect the media spotlight on the groups most likely to suffer victimization. It's no lost cause, claim co-founders Natalie Wilson, a public relations veteran, and Derrica Wilson, the first Black woman to join the Falls Church, Va., police department. After a 2012 segment about 16-year-old Mishell-Nicole DiAmonde Green aired on "The View," an anonymous tipster gave Black and Missing information that eventually led to the discovery of the girl. The call came in less than 15 minutes.
The docuseries brims with similarly attention-grabbing cases, but its raison d'etre is to explore the gaps between law enforcement and media organizations, on the one hand, and Black communities, on the other, filled by the titular organization. Tips are often relayed to Black and Missing instead of the police, such is the distrust of cops by many people of color. The Wilsons claim that law enforcement is slow to act on reports of missing people, too often classifying underage cases as runaways rather than potential victims - a designation that mandates much less urgent action.
The mainstream media is just as complicit, roaring into gear only when there's an Elizabeth Smart or a Natalee Holloway to rescue. White femininity has long been coded as innocent and in need of protection, often from Black aggressors. Violence in Black communities is treated as the norm; violence in White communities as an aberration. Given that history of polarized racialization, a series commentator asserts that "when a Black person is in distress - missing, murdered - it's not a big deal to much of White society because they don't think we have much to lose."
Sedate and somber in a stately, muted palette, "Black and Missing" can feel overly padded. Gwen Ifill's phrase "missing White woman syndrome" - describing the frenzy with which news outlets, especially image-centric ones like television and the tabloids, focus on victims of a select demographic - doesn't get name-checked until the second hour. But it's difficult to begrudge the series when it's conscientiously modeling how true crime, as well as journalism at large, should cover missing-persons cases: Humanizing the victims, sensitive to the traumas of their loved ones, illuminating of the psychology of abuse, de-emphasizing the killers or kidnappers and mindful that law enforcement is made up of a wide array of individuals, some of whom are more willing than others to reconsider their tactics and worldviews, especially when it comes to the potential re-victimization of survivors.
It's nearly impossible to discuss the subject of missing children and adults in the United States without treading into hotly debated statistics and otherwise disputed data. Early in the series, Natalie Wilson cites an alarming FBI figure, that more than 600,000 people were reported missing in 2019, without noting that only a couple thousand of those reports remain open. (More than 99% of children reported missing return home.) The docuseries leaves some of this guesswork and fact-checking up to the viewer, which is unfortunate, as are brief sequences dedicated to "stranger danger" (prominently featuring the controversial former "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh) that lapse into outdated fearmongering.
Beyond the numbers, the Wilsons' message remains clear: Black children are inordinately subject to violence because of the many inequities of this country and because slow or no response from law enforcement and the media make them a more exploitable target. The stories in "Black and Missing" are truly heartbreaking, as are the indelible images of the grieving mothers who can't give up the search for their children. The series's creative team, spearheaded by Soledad O'Brien and Geeta Gandbhir, smartly spotlight a range of cases that collectively illustrate the differences among Black victims by, say, gender, age, education or neurotypicality. But in its zeal to revise true crime narratives, "Black and Missing" falls back on some hoary tropes. The families' stories are already gut-wrenching enough.
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"Black and Missing" (four episodes) concludes with Episodes 3 and 4 on Wednesday, Nov. 24, at 8 p.m. on HBO. Episodes are also available for streaming on HBO Max.
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