In the spring of 1991, after the release of a bystander video showing three Los Angeles Police Department officers brutally beating Rodney King, Tom Bradley, then mayor of L.A., commissioned a report on the city’s police department and its practices. Its findings were as horrifying as they were unsurprising. Excessive force was rampant and all but encouraged, with the worst offenders rarely, if ever disciplined. The report was largely a confirmation of things many Angelenos, especially non-white ones, already knew. But along with the report came reams of transcribed communication among the officers, usually sent between the computer systems mounted in patrol cars. In these messages, one acronym kept recurring, almost always in reference to crimes involving Black perpetrators or victims: NHI, “No Human Involved.”
A similar phrase echoes through the imagined scandal that drives the plot of Succession, the hit HBO dramedy from the British writer Jesse Armstrong. In the show — a fictionalized expansion of Armstrong’s beloved but unproduced script about the Murdochs — a family-controlled media conglomerate even bigger than NewsCorp is thrown into chaos when its patriarch suffers a stroke. As his children wrestle for current and future control, a major scandal is buried, then broken. Over many years, executives in charge of the corporation’s lucrative cruise division paid millions of dollars in settlements and spent millions more covering up sexual abuse, assault, and possibly even murder. If a harmed (or deceased) individual is “a sex worker or a migrant worker,” as a whistleblower explains, the event is marked in internal logs as an “incident NRPI,” or No Real Person Involved.
