Black History Month Keynote | Re-examining the State’s Police Power, Safety Deprivation and the Meaning of Citizenship for Black Americans

Monday, February 28, 2022
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
(Pacific)

Zoom Registration required:

Speaker: 
  • Tracey L. Meares

Join the REDI Task Force for an invigorating keynote speech by Professor Tracey L. Meares, weaving together the past and present linkages between racial inequality and the law.

Safety and security are critical building blocks of community vitality, but too often the state’s response to safety — especially in race-class subjugated communities — is to assume that armed first responders are coincident with public safety. This response is wrong both normatively and empirically, but it does not mean that the state ought to retreat from its obligation to address safety deprivation.  This lecture will focus on the concept of “the police power,” which has a long history outside the policing service, and what it might mean to rethink it.
 

This online event is free and open to the public.

 

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image of Tracey L. Meares

Speaker bio:

Tracey L. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and a Founding Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1995 to 2007, serving as Max Pam Professor and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice. She was the first African American woman to be granted tenure at both law schools.

Professor Meares is a nationally recognized expert on policing in urban communities. Her research focuses on understanding how members of the public think about their relationship(s) with legal authorities such as police, prosecutors and judges. She teaches courses on criminal procedure, criminal law, and policy and she has worked extensively with the federal government having served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council standing committee and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs Science Advisory Board.

In April 2019, Professor Meares was elected as a member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2014, President Obama named her as a member of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.