Feminist Generation Demands Justice for Saniyah Cheatham

We are disgusted and horrified by the lack of transparency following the heartbreaking and suspicious death of 18 year old Saniyah Cheatham, a young Black woman from the Bronx who died in NYPD custody in July 2025. Feminist Generation mourns her loss and uplifts her family’s demands for additional details about Saniyah’s death including video footage of her arrest and detention and her autopsy report. Saniyah’s family deserve clarity, closure, and justice for these tragic events, from her unnecessary arrest to contradictory statements about her death.

Police departments in the U.S. are underregulated and overresourced while social services to address poverty, mental health, and non-violent conflict resolution are consistently underfunded. This creates the circumstances where police have the unchecked power to arrest and brutalize teenagers, unarmed people, and innocent community members. Saniyah’s suspicious death in police custody echoes the death of Sandra Bland in a jail cell in Texas in 2015. In both cases the arrest and detention of these unarmed Black women for minor infractions was not necessary and did not contribute to public safety. Instead the police subjected these women to state violence via incarceration and detention, contributing to their untimely and unjust deaths in police custody.

Despite numerous criminal justice and police reforms like body cameras, our community members keep being killed by the police, from direct violence and abuse to negligence and wrongful actions. We cannot keep these violent systems of policing and detention, born out of slavery, and expect different outcomes for our communities. People of color, and especially black people deserve safety and justice that police, prisons, and jails cannot ever provide. For young Black women like Saniyah Cheatham to safely thrive we must defund police and invest in community care and resources. We must create cultures of community care that do not treat people as disposable, including when they do harm, and offer restorative justice to those who are wronged. We must address underlying issues like poverty and mental health with abundant resources and we must shift our culture from a punitive approach to a restorative one that ensures true justice and accountability.

Saniyah Cheatham deserved so much more than what the NYPD and our “justice system” could provide for her. Her family deserves to know the truth and to know that what happened to Saniyah will never happen again. Saniyah should be with her family and her loved ones, she should be returning to school this fall, she should have been able to lead a rich full life without racialized and gendered state violence from the NYPD. We mourn this deep injustice that far too many Black families in the U.S. have been forced to endure and we endeavor to enact radical change so that Black women and girls of color can live with true safety, dignity, and justice.

August 27, 2025