Current Events

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Event Flyer

Shared Materials:

• https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-black-women/
• https://950b1543-bc84-4d80-ae48-656238060c23.filesusr.com/ugd/0c71ee_0430993a393840f7af620d34b8e4624e.pdf
• https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/
• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ee39ec764dbd7179cf1243c/t/5f9c405569362b211c3bcc8d/1604075605257/DEFUND+%26+DVAM.pdf
• https://millionexperiments.com/
• https://defundpolice.org/
• https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/how-actually-fix-americas-police/612520/

Symposium Schedule:

Speaker Biographies:

Keynote: Andrea Ritchie

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant police misconduct attorney and organizer whose writing, litigation, and advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color for the past two decades. She is currently Researcher in Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she recently launched the Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action initiative. She is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color  (Beacon Press 2017), Say Her Name: What it Means to Center Black Women’s Experiences of Police Violence in Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Press 2016), Surviving the Streets of New York: Experiences of LGBT Youth, YMSM and YWSW Engaged in Survival Sex (Urban Institute 2015) and Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color, in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (South End Press 2006); co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (AAPF 2015); A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People Living with HIV (2014); and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011), and has published numerous articles, policy reports and research studies.
 
She is a nationally recognized expert and sought after commentator on policing issues, and works with groups across the country to support campaigns to end profiling, police violence criminalization, mass incarceration, and deportation. She has testified before the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Prison Rape Elimination Commission, and a number of United Nations treaty bodies. She is a member of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, and was a founding member of the Steering Committee of New York City's Communities United for Police Reform, a city-wide campaign to challenge discriminatory, unlawful and abusive policing practices in New York City led by grassroots community groups, legal organizations, policy advocates and researchers from all five boroughs. She was appointed to the New York City Council Young Women's Initiative in 2015, where she co-chaired the Anti-Violence and Criminalization Working Group. She was a 2014 Senior Soros Justice fellow, a founder of the National LGBT HIV Criminal Justice Working Group and chair of its policing subgroup. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Invisible Institute. Her articles and opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Essence, the Guardian, the Root, the Lily, Rewire, Think Progress, and TruthOUT, and she regularly appears in national media outlets, including HBO, BET, MSNBC, and NPR.

Ritchie has taught classes on Policing; Race, Gender, and Punishment; Black Feminism; Social Justice; and Human Rights at American University, Northeastern Law School, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois-Chicago.
 
Ritchie was lead counsel in Tikkun v. City of New York, ground-breaking impact litigation challenging unlawful searches of transgender people in police custody, and drafted and negotiated sweeping changes to the NYPD’s policies for interactions with LGBTQ New Yorkers, and has since supported organizations and law enforcement agencies across the country in developing policies around police interactions with women and LGBTQ people. She also served as co-counsel to the Center for Constitutional Rights in Doe v. Jindal, a successful challenge to Louisiana’s requirement that individuals convicted of “crime against nature by solicitation” register as sex offenders, and Doe v. Caldwell, the class action filed to remove all affected individuals from the registry, resulting in relief for over 800 class members. In Adkins v. City of New York, she secured a groundbreaking ruling that law enforcement discrimination against transgender people is subject to heightened constitutional scrutiny. In addition to impact litigation, she maintained a small practice focused on challenging police profiling and brutality against women and LGBTQ people of color in New York City for 15 years.
 
As a member of the national collective of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence from 2003 – 2008, she served on the editorial collective for the Color of Violence Anthology, and coordinated the development of the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Organizer’s Toolkit on Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color and Transgender People of Color.
 
Ritchie was also a primary author of In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States, a “shadow report” submitted on behalf of over 100 national and local organizations and individuals to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Additionally, as a consultant to the U.S. Human Rights Network, she coordinated the participation of over 200 local, state and national organizations in the 2008 review of the U.S. government’s compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
 
She also served as expert consultant, lead researcher and coauthor for Amnesty International’s 2005 report Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States, was a consultant for Caught in the Net, a report on women and the “war on drugs” published by the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Break the Chains, and co-author of Education Not Deportation: Impacts of New York City School Safety Policies on Immigrant Youth, published by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM).
 
She is a proud graduate of Howard University School of Law and had the privilege of clerking for the Honorable Emmet G. Sullivan on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia

Panel 1:

Kami Chavis

Kami Chavis is the Vice Provost and Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at Wake Forest University School of Law. In 2015, she was appointed as a Senior Academic Fellow at the Joint Center for Political And Economic Studies. She has substantial practice experience and writes and teaches in areas related to criminal law, criminal procedure and criminal justice reform. After receiving her J.D. from Harvard Law School, she worked as an associate at private law firms in Washington, D.C., where she participated in various aspects of civil litigation, white-collar criminal defense, and internal investigations. In 2003, she became an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, involving her in a wide range of criminal prosecutions and in arguing and briefing appeals before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Professor Chavis frequently makes presentations on law-enforcement issues and is a leader in the field of police accountability. Her articles have appeared in the American Criminal Law Review, the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the University of Alabama Law Review, and the Catholic University Law Review, and other legal journals. Her research focuses on using Cooperative Federalism principles and stakeholder participation to implement sustainable reforms in the criminal justice system. She writes in the areas of police and prosecutorial accountability, federal hate crimes legislation and enforcement, and racial profiling. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2012.

She is a frequent contributor to national and international media outlets and has appeared on CNN, CTV, and NPR. She has written for the New York Times and the Huffington Post, and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, U.S. News and World Report, International Business Times, Deutsche Welle, and other outlets regarding police accountability and the structural reform of law enforcement agencies.

SpearIt

SpearIt is currently Professor of Law at Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. He is also Chair of the American Bar Association Subcommittee on Prisoner Education, as well as the Subcommittee on Pell Grant Funding.  He is a Contributing Editor at Jotwell Criminal Law and The Islamic Monthly. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Law & Religion/Section on Minority Groups.

He was born in the Skagit Valley in Washington State, son of an immigrant laborer from Mexico. At the age of 11, he moved to Houston, Tx, and has lived there on-and-off ever since.  He holds a J.D. from the University of California Berkeley School of Law (2009), Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara (2006), and Master in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School (2000).  He has taught for the Prison University Project at California’s death-row facility, San Quentin State Prison, as well as taught Corrections at Saint Louis University School of Law, in addition to serving on the Advisory Board of the Prison Program.

Seth Stoughton

Seth Stoughton is an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and an Associate Professor (Affiliate) in the university’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He is also affiliated with the Rule of Law Collaborative. His scholarship on policing and how it is regulated has appeared in the Emory Law Journal, Minnesota Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and other top journals. He has written multiple book chapters and is the principal co-author of Evaluating Police Uses of Force (NYU Press 2020). He is a frequent lecturer on policing issues, regularly appears on national and international media, and has written about policing for The New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME, and other news publications. He teaches Police Law & Policy, Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, and the Regulation of Vice.

Seth served as an officer with the Tallahassee Police Department for five years. In that time, he trained other officers, helped write policies to govern the use of new technologies, earned multiple instructor and operator certifications, and taught personal safety and self-defense courses in the community. In 2004, he received a Formal Achievement Award for his role as a founding member of the Special Response Team. After leaving the police department, Seth spent three years as an Investigator in the Florida Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, where he handled a variety of criminal and administrative investigations. In 2008, he received a statewide award for his work combating private school tuition voucher fraud.

Seth earned his B.A. in English from Florida State University. He attended the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was an Articles Editor on the Virginia Law Review, an Elsie Hughes Cabell Scholar, and the recipient of the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Kenneth F. Ripple of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Prior to joining the faculty at South Carolina, Seth was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where he taught legal writing and a Regulation of Vice seminar.

Katie Tinto

Professor Tinto teaches, practices, and researches in the areas of criminal law, criminal justice, the intersection of criminal law and immigration law, and indigent criminal defense. Her interests and experience also include federal and state clemency, policing reform, and reentry services. Before joining UCI Law in July 2016, Professor Tinto taught at Cardozo School of Law and NYU School of Law.

Prior to entering academia, Professor Tinto worked for over seven years as a public defender in Los Angeles County and prior to law school she was the founder of a family violence prevention program in the East Palo Alto Police Department. Professor Tinto attended NYU School of Law where she was a Root Tilden Kern Scholar. After graduating, she clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Panel 2:

Alex Vitale

Alex S. Vitale is professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally.

He is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, NY Daily News, and USA Today.

Paige Fernandez

Paige Fernandez is the Policing Policy Advisor in the ACLU’s National Political Advocacy Department. Fernandez develops and implements comprehensive strategies that advance the ACLU’s affirmative vision for reducing the role, power, presence, and responsibilities of the police in U.S. communities. She also develops and leads nationwide advocacy around police practices.
Fernandez’s approach to policing advocacy places communities at the forefront of the work, a practice rooted in her grassroots experience. Prior to joining the ACLU, she co-founded and directed multiple chapters of Together We Stand, a nonprofit aimed at dismantling racism, discrimination, and police brutality. She also has a master’s degree in Public Policy from Oxford University and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.

James Gagliano

James A. Gagliano currently serves as a law enforcement analyst and policing methodology subject matter expert for CNN, where he provides on-air analyses of complex law enforcement and counter-terror matters. An adjunct assistant professor and doctoral candidate at St. John’s University in Queens, NY, he is a sought-after speaker on criminal justice, homeland security and organizational leadership matters, and delivers keynote addresses for corporate clients and in academic settings. He is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF).

Prior to joining CNN, Gagliano served 25 years with the FBI. During his career with FBI, he was appointed to a variety of investigative, tactical resolution, crisis management, undercover, mid-level and senior management positions, including assignment to the FBI’s elite counterterror unit, the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), and as the Senior Team Leader of the FBI New York Field Division’s SWAT Team. During the Global War on Terrorism, between 2002 and 2003, he deployed to Afghanistan three separate times in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. He was awarded FBI’s second highest award for valor, the Medal of Bravery, for his SWAT Team’s actions in June of 1993. In one of his final FBI assignments, he studied Spanish language at US State Department, then served as the deputy legal attaché and acting legal attaché at the United States Embassy in México City, México, prior to retiring in 2016.

A 1987 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and US Army veteran, he was commissioned as an Infantry Officer, serving as a light infantry platoon leader and company executive officer in the 10th Mountain Division, while stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia and Fort Drum, New York between 1988 and 1991. His military awards include the Airborne, Air Assault, Jungle Expert and Expert Infantryman’s badges, as well as the Ranger tab.

Mr. Gagliano and his wife, Tiffany, Dean of the School of Business at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY, have five children between them, while sharing custody of Jaxon, a sweet, rescued Pit Bull, and reside in upstate New York.    

Keith “Wildstyle” Paschall

Wildstyle Paschall is a musician, producer, visual artist, activist and author. As a producer, photographer, curator and photographer for All317HipHop, roving illustrator for The Learning Tree, and Central Indiana Community Foundation Ambassador, he strives to make the invisible (issues, people, art) visible in Indianapolis.