With gratitude . . .

Thank you, Stephen, for the warm welcome. I am honored to be part of the blogging team! I love the idea of creating a space where crim profs can come together and share their random thoughts on life, teaching, and all things criminal. 😊 I really appreciate that our fearless leader, S, is a big fan of building community and camaraderie among us crim profs. And so, because it was Stephen asking, I welcome the opportunity to share my random musings with you all, and I look forward to building a positive and supportive crim prof environment (outside the typical W-I-P workshop or conference get together).

That said, I’d like to dedicate my first post to Jessalyn Walker with the American Bar Association’s Legal Education Police Practices Consortium. In the summer of 2020, as the world watched events leading to the injury and death of many at the hands of law enforcement, a group of law school administrators joined with the ABA to brainstorm about a way to address the injustices and train a new generation of legal thinkers to approach the issue in a way that learned from the experiences of the past. Born from this group was a new initiative of the ABA, housed within the Criminal Justice Section. Sixty member law schools originally pledged five years to the pilot program. The ABA Legal Education Police Practices Consortium in the last few years has sought to contribute to the national effort examining and addressing legal issues in policing and public safety, including conduct, oversight, and the evolving nature of police work. Jessalyn and her team of fellows (law students throughout the country) have gathered data on local police practices in their local communities and have interviewed numerous scholars and law enforcement on some of the most important topics in policing. https://abalegaledpoliceconsortium.org/ If you haven’t already, I recommend you check it out – the site has some great resources.

The Consortium’s overall goal has been to collaborate with law schools “to advance the practice of policing, promote racial equity in the criminal legal system, and eliminate policing tactics that are racially motivated or have a disparate impact based on race.” One of those ways was to support the development of law school curriculum that might create a forum to discuss controversial policing issues, policies, and practices. As my dean signed onto the Consortium in 2020, I was tapped to create a policing practices course at our law school. I would have been utterly lost without the help of Jessalyn, her law enforcement contacts, and Seth Stoughton’s graciousness in sharing his syllabus and materials for a similar course. Rachel Harmon’s book The Law of the Police was also super helpful. I thought I understood policing practices after teaching crim pro for so many years. I was wrong – there was so much more to learn. But more of that perhaps in a future blog.

What I wanted to mention was that Jessalyn organized a team of profs to create an online law of the police course hosted by the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. 7.5 weeks, fully online, self-paced and asynchronous, and FREE. When the course opened last month, 333 people signed up – this number included law enforcement personnel, law enforcement academies, attorneys, students, law schools, university staff, and community members from across the nation.  https://law.arizona.edu/law-police-online-course Wow! Imagine what an impact that course might have on police, law students (future prosecutors and defense counsel), and even community members. As the first five years of the Consortium come to a close, I’d like to give kudos to Jessalyn and her team for turning dreams of creating projects that develop and implement better police practices across the United States into reality. If we want to see change, we have to play the long game and take one step at a time. Or in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, "Be the change that you wish to see in the world."