Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant and a police misconduct attorney and organizer on the front lines of efforts to end profiling, policing, criminalization and mass incarceration of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people of color for over two decades.
She recently published Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Beacon Press 2017), and is the co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (African American Policy Forum 2015) and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011). Ritchie is currently Researcher-in-Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and was a 2014 Senior Soros Justice Fellow. She regularly gives keynote addresses and serves on plenary panels at conferences and universities across the country.
Ritchie is a nationally-recognized expert and sought-after commentator on policing issues. 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 several United Nations Treaty Bodies. She served as co-chair of the New York City Council Young Women's Initiative Anti-Violence and Criminalization Working Group, is a founding member of the Federal LGBT Criminal Justice Working Group, chairing its policing subgroup, and is a founding member of the Steering Committee of New York City's Communities United for Police Reform.
She appears regularly in the New York Times, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, The Root, The Lily, Colorlines, Rewire, Cassius Life, and TruthOUT, as well as on MSNBC, C-Span, NBC Nightly News, NPR, HBO, and Al-Jazeera.
Ritchie is co-author of a number of policy and research reports including:
• The Impact of the Trump Administration’s Federal Criminal Justice Initiatives on LGBTQ People & Communities and Opportunities for Local Resistance (Lambda Legal 2018)
• Centering Black Women, Girls and Fem(me)s in Campaigns for Expanded Sanctuary and Freedom Cities (National Black Women's Justice Initiative and Ms Foundation 2017)
• The Crisis of Criminalization: A Call for a Comprehensive Philanthropic Response (Barnard Center for Research on Women 2017)
• Policing Race, Gender, and Sex: A Review of Law Enforcement Policies (Women and Criminal Justice 2017)
• Surviving the Streets of New York: Experiences of LGBT Youth, YMSM and YWSW Engaged in Survival Sex (Urban Institute. 2015)
• A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People Living with HIV, (Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School 2014)
• Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States (Amnesty International 2005)