It was standing room only at the “Race and Policing: Moving Forward” panel discussion at Stanford Law School Tuesday night, where more than 150 people gathered to listen to some of the nation’s top legal and criminal justice experts discuss race and policing.

The discussion is part of a series of events, classes and workshops during spring and winter quarters at the law school scheduled to encourage discussion and debate about issues prompted by the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the justice system’s response to those deaths, and ongoing protests and demonstrations in many communities.

Referring to the engagement of students on campus, Stanford Law School Dean M. Elizabeth Magill said, “I have never been more inspired by those around me, and especially our students, for their courage, their brilliance, their passion. I am confident that we will make progress because of them.” She moderated the discussion.

Panelists included Ronald L. Davis, director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Community Oriented Policing Services and former chief of the East Palo Alto (Calif.) Police Department; Associate Professor Ronald C. Tyler, who joined Stanford Law School in 2012 to direct the Criminal Defense Clinic after a 22-year career as an assistant federal public defender; Tracey L. Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School, who was recently named to the President’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing; and Stanford Law School Professor David Sklansky, an expert on policing and criminal law.

Panelists agreed that ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system requires a better understanding of different perspectives, as well as partnerships between community groups and police agencies. Confidence in policing also depends on determining whether people want police to focus only on lowering crime statistics or to also build trust between communities of color and police, said Davis. “Public safety has to be more than the absence of crime. It has to be the presence of justice,” he noted.

Davis and Tyler, both African-Americans, offered personal examples of the mistrust that people of color feel toward police. Tyler said people of color who are shadowed by officers describe it as “living under martial law in their own community.” He attributed it to the emphasis on the “broken windows” theory of policing that encourages stamping out small crimes like vandalism in order to create an atmosphere of lawfulness that will prevent more serious crimes. Tyler recommended documenting police activity with videos and photos to “trust but verify” their behavior.

Sklansky, who was a federal prosecutor before he became a law professor, said that, while there were many problems, police departments have come a long way since the 1950s by promoting diversity within their ranks and emphasizing community policing, which encourages partnerships between police agencies and the individuals and organizations they serve. He stressed that it is important to avoid stereotyping police and to remember “there are hundreds of thousands of police officers who are smart and compassionate.”

Reminding the audience that police “go places we don’t want to go and see people we don’t want to see,” he said, “If we are going to improve policing, we need to remember there are human beings inside those uniforms.”

He added that “we shouldn’t let prosecutors off the hook” because some of the recent violence was attributable to decisions that prosecutors made behind closed doors.

Meares said that our society requires police to do things they wouldn’t have to do in a society with more social support systems. People act differently, she observed, when they have “an expectation of benevolent treatment by those in authority.” Meares believes the federal government is very committed to righting the wrongs that have sparked police confrontations, as evidenced by Obama’s recent formation of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

Davis championed the idea of community policing, which enabled him to drastically reduce the homicide rate in East Palo Alto (at that time, the nation’s worst) when he was police chief. He said, “You hear people say that during times of economic hardship, we can’t afford to have community policing, but during times of economic hardship, we can’t afford not to.”

Davis added that he has great faith in the future of policing. “This generation of police officers is much better than my generation,” he said, noting that they are more educated, more balanced and more progressive.

The next programs in the series will be a discussion on Jan. 12 that is open to the public about “Grand Juries: An Arcane Institution or Sacred Cow?” and a talk on Jan. 28 that is open to the Stanford community by Stanford Law Professor Norman Spaulding called “Rights Without Remedies: Litigating Claims of Police Bias and Excessive Police Force.”

Those interested in the latest news about race and policing activities on the Stanford campus can follow hashtag #SLSforJustice on Twitter.