What Is Justice for You?

After police violence, the state protects cops. Survivors have to protect each other.

- By Samantha Michaels. Photography by John Cherry

On a warm Friday afternoon in February, Bianca Austin waits in her Airbnb in Gulfport, Mississippi, for a new friend to come by. "Hey, girl!" she says, jumping up from her chair as Katrina Mateen walks through the front door in a trenchcoat, her face framed by big sunglasses and a sparkly baseball hat. They hug like they've known each other for ages, though they only met last October, after police shot and killed Mateen's son outside a nearby Family Dollar store. His birthday was earlier this week he would have been 16-and she and Austin spent the prior night trying to bail out some protesters.

"You get some sleep?" asks Austin, who drove from the airport to the jail around midnight.

"I was knocked out in that car," Mateen replies; they'd waited outside the jail till 6 a.m.

"I know you was!" says Austin.

Austin lives in Kentucky but has come to Gulfport repeatedly to help Mateen, feeling a special kinship. It wasn't too long ago that police in Louisville shot and killed one of Austin's nieces, Breonna Taylor. "You just see somebody in pain, and you know the pain they're going through," Austin says. "You just want to embrace them and try to be there."