Part of the 2019 Windham-Campbell Festival: https://windhamcampbell.org
In 1966, James Baldwin wrote that “the police are simply the hired enemies of the population.” More than five decades later, police violence against civilians persists as a serious problem in the United States and around the world—and it is a problem that social media increasingly makes salient to groups long isolated from its reach. Can policing be transformed and, if so, what role might the humanities—specifically, journalism and literature—play in such a transformation? In this panel discussion, Tracey Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and a Founding Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, talks with David Chariandy, Raghu Karnad, and Rebecca Solnit about state violence, how policing informs collective identity, and the possibility of re-framing policing as a public good.
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, and 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 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.