Apparently, it wasn’t enough for a Cleveland police officer to shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice less than two seconds after arriving on-scene in 2014 and handcuff his sister when she tried to help him, nor for his mother to be left homeless in 2015 as she waited months for an investigation. It wasn’t enough for Cleveland to actually blame the little boy for his own death, or to present multiple reports which found his killing to be “reasonable”.

On Wednesday, in a letter submitted by the city’s Director of Law Barbara Langhenry, the City of Cleveland actually sued Tamir’s family for $500, which it claims is “past due – owing for emergency medical services rendered as the decedent’s last dying expense”, according to Cleveland Scene.

Tamir Rice: Cleveland says family owes $500 for EMS after fatal police shooting Read more

In the creditor’s claim, the line item expenses coldly break down to $450 for “Advance Ambulance Life Support” – dispatched after Cleveland officers “waited minutes to give first aid” to the boy one of them had shot – and another $50 for “mileage”.

In the coming days, we will likely hear that the city had no choice but to sue the Rice estate, that Cleveland is justified by the very economic and faux moral argument which scoundrels unleash in such scenarios (and which David Graeber tears apart in Debt: The First 5,000 Years): that “one has to pay one’s debts”.

But make no mistake: viewing Tamir as a debtor to a society which killed him is racial capitalism at its worst, which Nancy Leong calls “the process of deriving social or economic value from the racial identity of another person”.

It is the second such grotesque lawsuit against a dead black boy in less than a week by a party charged with his death. Just a few days ago, Chicago Police Officer Robert Rialmo sued the estate of 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier for $10m. According to CNN, the lawsuit alleges that “LeGrier’s actions had forced Officer Rialmo to end LeGrier’s life, and to accidentally take the innocent life of [bystander] Bettie Jones,” which “has caused, and will continue to cause, Officer Rialmo to suffer extreme emotional trauma”.

This again is vulgar racial capitalism: an attempt to extract as much value as possible from black lives, even by those which abuse or terminate them.

In between news of both of these lawsuits, the United States federal government announced that it is suing the city of Ferguson, which attorney General Loretta Lynch said came about after “painstaking negotiations [that] lasted more than 26 weeks as we sought to remedy literally years of systematic deficiencies”. Racial capitalism was at work here, too, as Ferguson shamefully had paid its bills for years by arresting and fining black people and even throwing them in (supposedly unconstitutional) debtors’ prisons. When Ferguson’s “city council rejected the consent decree approved by their own negotiators”, Lynch said, the federal government had no choice but to sue them to comply.

At least this last lawsuit is filed in the name of justice for black people and, according to the Washington Post, the odds are in the feds’ favor: Since the beating of Rodney King in 1991, the Justice Department has launched 67 civil rights investigations against local police forces, and it won all but one of them.

But it is depressing that when something terrible happens to black people, our lives can be reduced to the clinical scale of dollar amounts and court filings.

“The records which slavers have left are remarkable for one thing,” historian Toby Green writes in The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300 - 1589: “their extremely narrow economic focus.” In describing the cold, quantitative and monetary records those in the slave trade left of the human beings they owned, trafficked and sold, Green writes : “Those documents reveal a mindset uninterested in the world beyond the narrow perimeters of profit and survival.”

When the historians of the future look at Cleveland’s lawsuit against a dead black child or a Chicago cop’s lawsuit against a dead teenager, will they, too, think that – when it comes to black lives mattering – we have a mindset “uninterested in the world beyond the narrow perimeters of profit and survival”? That our records render meaningless the lives of the black humans to mere dollars?