In America, there is a common conversation between black parents and their children, long known as “the talk”. It is about what to do when approached by a police officer.

How to talk. How to act. How, simply, to survive.

In recent years, high-profile killings of black men and boys have brought “the talk” to national attention. It has become part of discussion of the inequalities of race, of the problem of police brutality itself.

For most black families, “the talk” is a choice, a just-in-case, a part of raising children. When explaining what can go wrong, there are too many examples to use.

They may discuss what happened to a young man who visited a convenience store and then made his way home in New York. They may discuss what happened to a 12-year-old boy who played with a pellet gun in a park in Cleveland. They may discuss what happened to a 40-year-old man who stopped his car on a public road in Tulsa.

Others discuss those cases each day. They are the women, men and children who lived with the dead, who raised them, who called them brother or father or son.

In New York, Ohio and Oklahoma, the Guardian spoke to those families. For them, “the talk” does not define one moment in their lives. It is the definition of everything after.

They are the families left behind.

The brother

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chinnor Campbell, brother of Ramarley Graham. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

Chinnor Campbell cowered in the living room, hiding behind the white wall that separated the space from the narrow hallway.

Ramarley Graham, his 18-year-old half-brother, had walked through the front door of the apartment in the Bronx, New York, a couple of minutes before, as the six-year-old was changing his clothes and talking to their grandmother. She had just picked him up from elementary school. The conversation was stopped by a banging on the door.

Cops.

They had started following Ramarley just a few minutes before, around 3pm on 2 February 2012, when he left a bodega on White Plains Road and East 228th Street and began to make his way home. CCTV footage shows he seemed unaware that police were scrambling behind him. A couple of minutes later, the same footage shows, police ran up to the apartment block into which Ramarley had walked. They banged on the back door until someone let them in. They raced to the second floor, up the narrow stairs.

Chinnor heard their shouts, their commands. Ramarley turned and walked toward the noise, just a few feet. The boys’ slight, petite grandmother followed shielding Ramarley even though he towered over her.

The officers slammed into the apartment. Between screams, a single shot rang out. Chinnor leaned away from the wall, peering toward the bathroom. He could see his brother’s feet, splayed out into the hallway.

Ramarley Graham was dead.

Richard Haste, the officer who fired the shot, said he thought the teen might have had a gun. He did not. The only guns were in the hands of the officers.

Chinnor watched as officers took his grandmother down to the police station. They kept her there seven hours.

Removed from the apartment, the six-year-old stood in the cold dusk, wearing only a shirt and his underwear, his brother dead on the floor. Officers walked him downstairs, where a neighbor said he would watch him. Chinnor was in a first-floor apartment when his mother, Constance Malcolm, came home. The neighbor had called her and said there were police in the backyard, but stopped short of breaking the news. Constance found out at the station.

In the months after Ramarley’s death, Constance organized 18 marches, one for each year of her son’s life. Chinnor, still in first grade, marched with her. They kept Ramarley in the public eye, his death in public discussion. In contrast, Constance says, in the months and years since, the boys’ grandmother has refused to discuss the few minutes that uprooted their lives. Nor have Chinnor and his mother talked at any length about what happens after a loved one is killed by police.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Constance says, she was not able to identify her son for four days. Somehow, his body had been misnamed. When she went to identify him, at the morgue, there was no Ramarley Graham. For four days, it was as if he didn’t exist. The son who loved watching Animal Planet, who asked for a pet monkey to raise in the heart of the Bronx. The grandson who loved his grandmother’s Jamaican stewed peas. The brother who showed Chinnor how to lift weights, even though he was six, the favorite video game partner, sometimes his after-school escort home. He was gone, but his body was nowhere to be found.

Play Video 7:45 The families left behind after police killings: 'You never get over losing a child' – video

Even now, she says, Chinnor is too young to sit down for the talk. He’s only 13, just a year older than Tamir Rice was when he was killed in Cleveland in 2014. But she doesn’t avoid the subject. Chinnor goes with her to hear experts speak about officer-involved shootings, about how to cope with grief, about how to survive in America as a black man. Such public talks are common. Once, she took Chinnor to a class that aimed to tell young black men what to do when stopped on the street or pulled over when driving a car.

She lets the experts talk because, she says, she is not only a mother. She is still a grieving woman and she is working two jobs, seeking to keep her mind off what happened seven years ago.

“Maybe,” she says, “if the talk comes from somebody else he will understand. [Rather than] me telling him, as a woman, you know?”

When she does speak about the police in front of Chinnor, she’s careful. When Ramarley was shot, his older sister was training to become an officer.

“At the end of the day,” she says, “nobody wants to go out and don’t come back in. Even the police officers, they want to go out and go back home.”

She wants her son to come home.

Constance and Chinnor are having “the talk” every single day, in other ways, often without saying a word.

In a new home in a different neighborhood, on a quieter street in the Bronx, Constance shifts on her stool. Only a handful of pictures – mostly of her children – hang on the walls around her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Constance Malcolm and her son, Chinnor Graham. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

Nearly two years ago, she moved Chinnor and her mother out of the old apartment. It had taken a few years to realize they were both traumatized. Both had walked through an apartment where memories stuck to the walls. After all, Constance thought, she herself is traumatized from thinking of her son being shot in his own home and she wasn’t there to see it.

Because of the shooting, the move to a new home was possible. The New York police department (NYPD) claimed the officers who followed Ramarley thought he had a gun because they had watched him adjust his waistband as he left the bodega. But as the media reported and police investigated, it became clear the officer who shot Ramarley had not had the training required for the narcotics enforcement unit to which he was assigned.

Manslaughter charges were dropped, a judge saying the Bronx district attorney’s office had failed to properly instruct members of a grand jury. A second grand jury failed to bring an indictment.

But on the first anniversary of Ramarley’s death, the family sued, accusing the NYPD of improperly training its officers, disproportionately targeting minority youth through controversial stop-and-frisk practices and a cover-up surrounding the death. The city settled for $3.9m. Chinnor received $500,000.

In 2017, Haste faced disciplinary action, on NYPD charges including “poor judgement”. To avoid being fired, he resigned. Constance left the legal fight there.

She decided to give her son a chance to move on. In their new home, Chinnor has his own room in the back. She wants him to be comfortable, to have his own space and to start over fresh.

Chinnor doesn’t really go anywhere except school, his mother says, because she doesn’t allow him out on his own.

He’s still a kid, after all. In the hours after his brother’s death, she says, when he finally saw her, Chinnor ran to her and told her all he had seen. How, she asks, could he grasp all that at six? Now, seven years on, leaning into the kitchen island, the 13-year-old freezes when, in his retelling, he reaches the moments after his brother fell to the ground. He can’t get through it. He goes back to his room to play video games. He plays a lot on weekends, especially when his mom takes on extra shifts at the nursing home.

Sometimes, Chinnor says, he sneaks back to his old neighborhood to see friends, something his mom doesn’t like him to do. He glances over at his mother, offering a mischievous half-smile. Ramarley used to defend him when Constance was angry, he says.

But most days after school he chooses to stay in his room. It is painted a shade of blue between royal and cornflower and the only thing on the wall is directly next to his bed: a collage about his brother.

Unlike most children his age, he has a silent confidence. He sits through the conversations his mother has about his older brother, rarely speaking, always listening.

Constance wants her son to enjoy being a child. But she does finally admit that soon it will be time to have the talk, to sit down and, once and for all, talk about the police and what to do when they stop him.

She’ll tell him: “You know, I don’t want you to react a certain way. Just stay calm, keep your eye on that badge. You need that number. No matter, if you don’t remember anything else, make sure you remember that badge number, because that is what is going to identify that person that did whatever they did to you.”

She pauses.

“Yeah. So that’s just how we deal with it right now.”

The father

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joey and Leanna Crutcher. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tykiaha Crutcher points out dresses she would like to try on for her prom. The ones she likes sparkle.

Her grandparents, Joey and Leanna, are seated on the other side of a table set for seven, smiling at their four grandchildren. Joey, whose grandkids call him JoJo, pushes his rice and beans around his plate. He’s not interested in eating. For the 920 days before this one, he has felt the same.

If Tykiaha’s father, Terence, were still alive, he would have helped pick out her dress. Well, she says, he would have made sure he liked it and it wasn’t showing too much. Instead, Terence’s twin sister, Tiffany, will take Tykiaha and her two sisters shopping.

On the night of 16 September 2016, Terence Crutcher was meant to go to a music appreciation class at community college. When it was cancelled, he made his way to Friday night choir practice, where his father was waiting. After that, he was supposed to go to a birthday party for Tykiaha’s younger sister Tyjunae. He never made it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Terence Jr, son of Terence Crutcher. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

Responding to a 911 call, officers were sent to a road in Tulsa on which Terence had stopped his car. He had left the vehicle, which witnesses said he said he thought was about to “blow up”. The officers approached him as a helicopter filmed from above.

One officer used a Taser. The other, Betty Shelby, shot Terence. She killed him. The helicopter footage zooms in, showing Terence on the ground.

Shelby’s attorney later said the officer claimed that Terence’s behavior was erratic and he did not comply with commands. Local news outlets reported that police said a vial of PCP, a hallucinogen, was found in the vehicle. The Crutcher family and their supporters say that was used to deflect attention from the officers’ conduct.

That night, Tykiaha was celebrating an away win for the Central high football team when one of her aunts called, asking if her daddy was OK. “What do you mean?” she asked. Her aunt asked again. Yeah, she told her, he’s going to Tyjunae’s birthday party.

No, her aunt said.

“He was shot by a police officer.”

In shock, Tykiaha got on to the school bus, surrounded by classmates. Once she got back to campus, she called JoJo, then her grandmother, then her sisters. No one picked up. She can’t remember who finally answered. Whoever it was said her father was dead.

Only after the funeral did Tykiaha go back to school. When she did, the football team dedicated a game and a pep rally to her. Classmates asked if she was OK. She told them she didn’t know.

Her friends kept showing up to rallies, marches and galas, all in Terence’s name. On the biggest march, her aunt Tiffany says, some held a banner at the front of the crowd. When Imani, Tykiaha’s older half-sister, went back to school, some students organized a walkout, protesting her father’s death. One teacher let everyone skip class and talk through their concerns around policing and growing up black.

Years ago, JoJo took the same approach with his own son – Terence. He wanted to make sure he and others in north Tulsa, a predominantly black neighborhood, understood what it was to be stopped by police.

“We talked about this all of the time because black boys was always [being stopped], young black males,” JoJo says, in front of his grandchildren, in his split-level living room. Terence Jr is lying upside down on the brown carpeted stairs, playing video games. He edges his way towards his grandfather, finding a spot under the coffee table.

“African Americans was always the subject of police stops,” JoJo says. “We know what the disparity is, and I would say: ‘Well one thing you do to protect yourself if they tell you to stop, do that.’ Well, Terence didn’t do that. But anyway, Terence had bad hearing so he couldn’t really hear …”

Tykiaha interrupts. Her father couldn’t hear, she says. He also had one fake eye.

JoJo continues. “But what Terence was doing, he was doing what I had taught him to do. He had his hands up in the air.”

Video from the helicopter does indeed show Terence with his hands up. Police say he nonetheless did not follow directions.

Terence Jr’s sister and half-sisters – Imani, Tykiaha and Tyjunae – are still teenagers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Terence Jr with his sisters, Tykiaha Crutcher (left) and Tyjunae Crutcher. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

In the days after their father’s death, Imani says, the three girls sat together, discussing how they would keep the killing from their four-year-old brother. One day, tired after mornings of crying, their heads pounding, they were taking a rest when Terence came looking for Tykiaha.

“Kaka,” he said, “some white lady killed my daddy.”

Why, he asked.

“Oh my God,” she thought.

Tykiaha didn’t know how to respond. The child had overheard relatives as they prepared for the funeral.

“We don’t know, Terence,” she said. “She’s a bad person.”

She cried again that night.

Two and a half years later, Terence Jr is only seven. But the ones looking out for him, especially Aunt Tiffany, think it is time to have the talk.

“Terence,” Tiffany asks, “what did I tell you the other day about the police if you didn’t listen the first time?

Tykiaha repeats the question and asks: “What did Tiffany tell you, Terence?”

“I don’t remember,” he answers, shifting to a baby voice.

Tiffany stresses the importance of repetition in teaching Terence Jr how to navigate an unjust world. The boy interrupts her.

“Don’t disobey,” he says, suddenly.

His grandfather cheers.

The morning after his son was shot, JoJo showed up at church. There was a young men’s conference. He stayed, to be there for his community.

“I wish I had a dad,” Imani says, “but JoJo, he steps in every time.”

She’s speaking in a living room that serves mostly as a homage to her father. Terence smiles from one wall, surrounded by pictures of his children. Artwork by supporters and activists is framed in a reading nook.

“Grandpa always tell me it’s OK to cry about it,” says Tyjunae, 14, the youngest of the girls. He told her she may just need to draw about her father’s death, or pray about it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tiffany Crutcher at home. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

The elders in the family act as father, mother, an entire support system. When Tiffany is in town, between meetings with the family lawyer, doctor’s appointments and conversations with activists, she takes Terence Jr to a play center. The grandparents keep an eye on college applications and new boyfriends, describe dance classes and yearbook committees.

But each day since Terence was shot has been part of a conversation about injustice and race. No one shies away from the uncomfortable facts of living in Tulsa as one of the Crutchers.

“It does become a full-time job,” Tiffany admits. “It just becomes your lifestyle, pursuing justice and wanting better for the community. It just becomes a part of your DNA.”

What made her angry, she says, was that police, Tulsa residents and the media called her twin brother a suspect, a subject, a thug.

“That was their daddy,” she says, nodding over to the girls lined up on the sofa. “That was their son,” she says, looking at her parents.

“He was a man,” she says, her voice rising. “His car stalled. Whatever was going on with him mentally, he needed help. He needed help and you killed him.”

Terence Jr struggles to hold on to memories of his father. He likes to say his favorite color is blue, because his daddy’s favorite color was blue. This year, unprompted, he asked his school if he could profile his father for Black History Month. His teacher called Tiffany in for a chat, tried to convince Terence Jr to profile someone else. Maybe Barack Obama? But Terence Jr insisted.

“That’s my dad,” he says, pulling his project from his play area in the corner of the living room.

A picture falls off the board. Terence Jr, in his father’s lap.

“He got shot,” he says.

The mother

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samaria Rice. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

When she had Tamir, on 25 June 2002, Samaria Rice was living in a shelter in Cleveland.

She had spent her life on the streets since she was 12, after her mother went to prison, when her father kicked her out. Sometimes, she was homeless. Other times, she lived with men she met. On rare occasions she lived with family or friends. She sold drugs. She spent time in jail.

“I done been arrested so many times,” she says. “I mean, I ain’t trying brag about it, but I’ve done been in jail so many times in Cleveland, growing up as a juvenile.”

Her children would live different lives, she thought, as the four kids grew up. Before she had her oldest, Christmas and Thanksgiving were depressing, spent alone. But after Tasheona was born, in 1995, she “tried to be right about it”, giving her children holidays surrounded by her cousins, sometimes their grandfather, too.

The kids would all graduate high school, Samaria promised herself. Tasheona, Tavon and Tajai did. But Samaria will never know for certain if Tamir, her youngest, the 12-year-old she calls her baby, would have graduated, too.

She remembers a child who was months away from being a teenager but still let his mother kiss and hug him. His favorite foods were like any other child’s: cheese pizza, ice cream, macaroni and cheese, fries. He was an “all-American kid, you know?”

Tamir was bright, helpful and caring. When younger children needed help tying their shoes or getting their backpacks on, the sixth grader would help.

Most days, she didn’t let him past the porch. But on 22 November 2014, a Saturday afternoon, she let him walk down the street with Tajai, to the Mega Convenient Food Mart for chips and juice, then to the playground across the street. A friend had let Tamir borrow his pellet gun, from which the orange tip that signified it was a toy had been removed.

Tamir played with the gun outside the recreational center, two blocks away from his porch. Someone called 911, mentioning the gun was “probably fake” and the person holding it “was probably a juvenile”. That information was not relayed to Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old rookie police officer, and his partner, Frank Garmback.

Samaria has watched the surveillance video, of course. It shows that a police vehicle jumped a curb and went over a grassy hill, bypassing two driveways. Police say the car slid 40ft in the grass because the ground was wet. It pulled up near Tamir, who was sitting on a gazebo.

“Why would you jump that curb, go over the hill, almost knock the swing set down, and [slide] across there like you’re a cowboy, and murder my son?” Samaria asks.

Two seconds after jumping out of the car, Loehmann shot Tamir.

Tajai ran towards her brother. He had been shot in the abdomen. A witness heard her scream: “That’s my brother.” An off-duty officer working security grabbed her, took her down, handcuffed her and put her in the backseat of the police car, because she “would not calm down”.

All the law enforcement officers at the scene agreed that Tamir was a black male who looked older and bigger than his age.

The neighbor who had been with Tamir ran over to find Samaria. She ran two blocks, saw her daughter handcuffed in the back of a police car. She saw her son. She demanded to get in the ambulance with him. Seventeen minutes later, the ambulance left the parking lot.

The next day, her son died.

In October 2018, Tajai was working on a music video for Shooting without Bullets, a not-for-profit, with Amanda King, Samaria’s assistant. She was dancing, just hanging out with her friends. Then her sister called, to tell her Loehmann was going to be rehired as a police officer in Bellaire, Ohio.

King remembers Tajai screaming: “I hate him, I hate him! I want him to die!” Then she collapsed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tamir Rice. Photograph: AP

In the years since their brother was killed, Samaria has had a hard time talking to her children. They’re doing the best they can, she says. Before Tamir’s death, she hadn’t thought to talk to any of her children about police officers, about what to do when confronted by them, and about the deaths of so many black men in America.

In all her run-ins with officers, she says, they never put hands upon her. When she became a mother, she says, she simply tried to raise her kids the best she could. Until Tamir’s death, she lived in a bubble.

“I didn’t even pay it no attention,” she says. “I did not even know what was going on.”

Now she knows only too well. Her kids, she says, have not come close to healing. “They are never going to be able to get over their brother’s death,” Samaria says. So how can she talk to them about injustice, race and inequality? Right now, Samaria notices, “[T]hey are very effective [in] making bad decisions and choices out of life. So that’s how they’re dealing.”

She’s upset that Tasheona, 23, has two children already. As we speak, Tajai is pregnant, too.

“How you normal when your brother’s face is all over the TV and your friends see it?”

She has stopped trying to convince her children they need help.

Like any mother, Samaria worries about her children. But she says she’s not speaking to them right now. They have left her no choice, she says.

In 2016, the family and the city of Cleveland reached a $6m settlement. Tajai received the most, her mother says, because of what she saw. Tajai and Tamir were like two peas in a pod, she says. Two years ago, for her 40th birthday, Christmas Eve, she got the kids together. Tajai cried, saying: “I miss my brother, I miss my brother, I miss my brother.” Samaria wanted her to go to counseling, to start dealing with the loss. But, she says, she hasn’t gone yet.

Instead, Samaria focuses on kids in the community. She bought a rundown building and renamed it: the Tamir Rice Cultural Center. Right now it’s empty. She wants it to offer civics classes. But if she has to, she will use the center to talk.

“If the police officer asks your name,” she’ll tell the local kids, “you give them your name. You have to identify and tell them you don’t have to speak to them unless a lawyer is present.

She also wants to develop a Tamir Rice safety guide, for parents to read to their children. What to do when your child is arrested or simply approached.

“I wasn’t no activist,” she says. “None of these families were. All of them have been forced to take on a job they wouldn’t wish upon anyone else.”

But now that’s what she is, an activist, whether she likes it or not. She wants, she says, to “tell these babies the truth because they’re our future.

At the park where Tamir was shot, Samaria stands where the gazebo used to be. She had it removed and is looking to have it bronzed, to have it stand as a memorial to her son.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A stuffed animal is fixed to the pilar of a gazebo at Cudell Commons park in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 2014. Photograph: Jordan Gonzalez/AFP/Getty Images

“If he had been white I believe it coulda turned out a different type of way,” she says of her son. “Maybe. I’m sure of it. I think about that all the time. Every time I hear about somebody getting killed by the police or even community violence, it tears on me. It weighs on me because I’m thinking that Tamir should’ve been enough. That should’ve been enough. Why are people still dying after my son by the police?

“I should be planning his prom. Helping him learn how to get his work permit, or his driver’s license. But, this is what I’ve been doing for the last four years.”

After Tamir was killed, Samaria got a tattoo on her hand. It is Proverbs 22:6: “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”

It ran in his obituary.