Tracie L. Keesee has been a serial trailblazer.  The first African American commander in the Denver Police Department.  Denver’s first female police captain.  The first deputy commissioner for equity and inclusion in the New York City Police Department (NYPD).  And the cofounder of the Center for Policing Equity, an organization dedicated to reducing racial disparities […]

Over the past couple of years, John Jay College professor Peter Moskos has been a prominent voice warning about the rise in violence in American cities and the potential perils of depolicing.  Moskos brings a unique point of view to the public conversation about policing: in addition to being a Harvard-trained sociologist, he spent more […]

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters took to the streets in many American cities to condemn police brutality. Some places also suffered from widespread looting and property destruction that will take years to restore.  Little of this came as a surprise to Kami Chavis, the director of the criminal […]

“Gun violence is tragic, but, in the majority of cases, is decidedly not random,” Northwestern University sociology professor Andrew Papachristos told the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this year. Employing both statistical models and qualitative methods, Papachristos has been able to show that a relatively small number of individuals are involved in gun violence within any given […]

“Everybody that I know got a family member dead or locked up,” says Slim, one of the young Black men featured in Life After the Gunshot, a digital storytelling project coproduced by Joseph Richardson, a professor of African-American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Maryland. A multimedia experiment, Life After the Gunshot gives voice […]

In one way or another, Jeremy Travis has been involved in almost every significant criminal justice reform effort of the past 50 years. This includes multiple efforts to address the problem of urban violence, which has had such a devastating impact on low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in particular.    Travis worked at the Vera […]

David Weisburd is one of the most prolific and important criminologists of the past 50 years. The winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, Weisburd has published more than two dozen books and more than two hundred scholarly articles.   Weisburd’s work has largely focused on the importance of place. Beginning with a ground-breaking study conducted […]

“Libraries, parks, rec centers, pools, free internet — those are all crime prevention activities and resources,” Caterina Roman, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, told the New York Times last year. Over the course of her career in academia and at the nonprofit Urban Institute, Dr. Roman has taken a broad view of […]

New York City is at a crossroads moment. In the 1970s and 1980s, New York City was an international symbol of chaos and disorder, with many observers concluding that the city had become “ungovernable.” That all changed in the early 1990s. Violent crime in New York City plummeted, with the number of murders reduced by […]

Marlon Peterson grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He experienced a difficult childhood, which culminated, at the age of nineteen, in his involvement in a robbery that led to the death of two people. Peterson ended up serving ten years in prison for his participation in this crime. While in prison, he earned a degree […]