Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp is launching an initiative to provide free, secondary autopsies for families of victims who have been killed by police or died in their custody.
The organization on Wednesday announced its "Autopsy Initiative," which it says will include completing a secondary autopsy, disclosing preliminary findings and issuing a final autopsy report of "police-related deaths" in an effort to combat possible prejudice in an initial autopsy.
"When a police-related death is involved," Kaepernick's organization wrote on its website, "various concerns may arise including the reliability of the first autopsy conducted, the objectivity of the autopsy, the risk of manipulation of evidence, potential bias on behalf of the coroner or medical examiner, or use of faulty forensic procedures."
Know Your Rights Camp defines a police-related death as occurring when a person "dies as a result of being shot, beaten, intentionally hit by a police vehicle, pepper sprayed, tasered" or "otherwise harmed" by an on- or off-duty law enforcement officer, such as a police officer, sheriff, correctional officer, highway patrol officer, state trooper, border patrol agent or an ICE special agent or officer.
The organization is relying on a panel of five forensic pathologists, whom Know Your Rights Camp said "will actively seek the truth to provide the victims' families with the most medically sound cause of death."
"The Initiative is aware that losing a family member due to police-related death is a tragic and heartbreaking experience," the organization wrote on its website. "The Initiative seeks to be a resource to victims’ family members by providing confidence in the forensic procedures and comfort in knowing the pathologists will conduct the autopsy with neutrality."
Kaepernick founded Know Your Rights Camp in 2016, the same year in which he protested systemic racism and police brutality against people of color by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before 49ers games. He has not played in the NFL since then, alleging in a since-settled lawsuit that the league's owners colluded to keep him out of the league because of his protest.
Through Know Your Rights Camp, Kaepernick has remained active off the field. In 2020, Know Your Rights Camp established a COVID-19 relief fund for Black communities disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, as well as a legal defense fund to provide lawyers to protestors arrested in demonstrations following George Floyd's death.
Last year, the 34-year-old edited "Abolition for the People" for his publishing company, while also executive producing and narrating a Netflix series about his upbringing, "Colin in Black & White." Kaepernick will also release a memoir and appear in a Spike Lee-directed ESPN documentary series about his career, neither of which have a release date.
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