Race and Policing: Moving Forward
- This event has passed.
A continuing series on current events
#SLSforJustice
Video recording of event available here: http://stanford.io/1ACwEvN
Panel discussion on law enforcement and racial equity. What lessons should be drawn from the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases and the widespread protests in their wake? How can distrust between the police and minority communities best be addressed? What roles can lawyers and law students play?
Dean M. Elizabeth Magill will moderate.
Panelists:
- Director Ronald L. Davis
- Professor Tracey L. Meares
- Professor David Sklansky
- Professor Ronald C. Tyler
Co-Sponsored by the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, The Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law, SLS Office of Student Affairs.
Panelist biographies:
Ronald L. Davis was appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder in November, 2013, to head the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The COPS Office is responsible for advancing community policing nationwide and supporting the community policing activities of state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies.
Director Davis’ appointment follows eight years of serving the City of East Palo Alto as Chief of Police. In East Palo Alto, Davis led an organizational reform and community-policing effort that increased public trust and confidence in the police and achieved dramatic crime and violence reductions in a city once dubbed the murder capital of the United States. Over a six-year period, homicides dropped by over 50 percent, overall crime decreased over 20 percent, and police and community relations dramatically improved.
Davis worked closely with the DOJ in the past, serving as a policing expert for the department’s Civil Rights Division. While in this capacity, Davis served on two federal monitoring teams with oversight of police-reform consent decrees between the DOJ and the Washington, D.C., and Detroit Police Departments.
Davis is the co-author of the Harvard University and National Institute of Justice (NIJ) publication, Exploring the Role of the Police in Prisoner Reentry, and the U.S. DOJ publication, How to Correctly Collect and Analyze Racial Profiling Data: Your Reputation Depends on It. He is a contributing author to the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) publications: Chief Concerns: The Use of Force and Early Release of Prisoners and Its Impact on Police Agencies and Communities in California.
Tracey L. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Before arriving at Yale Law School, she was Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School. She has held positions clerking for the Honorable Harlington Wood, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. Since 2004, she has served on the Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council Standing Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. Additionally, she has served on two National Research Council Review Committees: one to review research on police policy and practices and another more recently to review the National Institute of Justice. She also serves as a Senior Research Advisor for National Network for Safe Communities. In November of 2010, she was named by Attorney General Eric Holder to sit on the Department of Justice's newly-created Science Advisory Board. On Dec. 18, 2014, Ms. Meares was appointed by the President to the Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Professor Meares's teaching and research interests focus on criminal procedure and criminal law policy, with a particular emphasis on empirical investigation of these subjects. Her writings on such issues as crime prevention and community capacity building are concertedly interdisciplinary and reflect a civil society approach to law enforcement that builds upon the interaction between law, culture, social norms, and social organization. She has written widely on these topics in both the academic and trade press. Ms. Meares has been especially interested as of late in teaching and writing about communities, police legitimacy and legal policy, and she has lectured on this topic extensively across the country to audiences of academics, lay people, and police professionals. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
David Sklansky teaches and writes about criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence.
A former federal prosecutor, Sklansky brings rich knowledge of criminal justice institutions to his scholarship, which has addressed topics as diverse as the political science of policing, the interpretation and application of the Fourth Amendment, fairness and accuracy in criminal adjudication, the relationship between criminal justice and immigration laws, and the role of race, gender, and sexual orientation in law enforcement.
Sklansky is the author of the well-regarded evidence casebook, Evidence: Cases, Commentary, and Problems. His other recent publications include “Evidentiary Instructions and the Jury as Other,” Stanford Law Review (2013); “Crime, Immigration and Ad Hoc Instrumentalism,” New Criminal Law Review (2012); “Private Police and Human Rights,” Law & Ethics of Human Rights (2011); “Hearsay’s Last Hurrah,” Supreme Court Review (2009); and “Anti-Inquisitorialism” Harvard Law Review (2009).
Prior to joining the faculty of Stanford Law School in 2014, Sklansky taught at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA; he won campus-wide teaching awards at both those institutions. Earlier he practiced labor law in Washington D.C. and served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles.
Ron Tyler joined Stanford Law School in 2012 to direct the Criminal Defense Clinic after a 22 yearlong career as an assistant federal public defender with the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of California. A dedicated defense attorney and nationally recognized expert, he has litigated at trial and appellate courts covering the full gamut of federal criminal cases. A founding member of the faculty of the Federal Trial Skills Academy and a faculty member of the Office of Defender Services Training Branch, he teaches regularly at seminars for criminal defense attorneys, investigators, and paralegals. He also teaches at the annual National Criminal Defense College in Georgia. He taught trial advocacy at UC Hastings College of the Law as an adjunct professor for many years. He is also active with several nonprofits including the American Civil Liberties Union, serving on its national board of directors.
Professor Tyler received his BS in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 and had a brief career in high tech before changing his career focus to public interest advocacy. He began law school as a Tony Patiño Fellow at Hastings College of the Law and earned his JD from UC Berkeley School of Law in 1989, where he served as notes and comments editor on the Ecology Law Quarterly. After law school, he clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.
Related Media