Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City

Contributors

Contributors HEATHER BARR, a lawyer and advocate for the rights of mentally ill criminal defendants and prisoners, is a Soros Justice Fellow at the Urban Justice Center in New York City. She is counsel to the plaintiffs in Brad H. v. The City of New York, a lawsuit regarding New York City’s failure to provide discharge planning for people with mental illness being released from New York City jails. She also works as a consultant at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, where she helped create the Nathaniel Project, the first alternative-to-incarceration program for seriously mentally ill felony offenders in the United States. DERRICK BELL is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He has written extensively on race and racism in American law, including And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, Confronting Authority, Afroatlantica Legacies, and Faces at the Bottom of the Well. PAUL G. CHEVIGNY is a Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He has published numerous books on First Amendment issues and on police abuse, including Police Power: Police Abuses in New York City (Pantheon, 1969) and Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas (New Press, 1995.) COMMITTEE AGAINST ANTI-ASIAN VIOLENCE: ORGANIZING ASIAN COMMUNITIES, formerly known as CAAAV, was founded in 1986. It is a pan-Asian grassroots organization that organizes Asian immigrant communities in New York City to combat racist violence in its multiple forms, such as economic exploitation, police brutality, and poverty. TANYA ERZEN is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies Program at New York University. Her essay on the Religious Right appears in The 289 Promise Keepers: Essays on Masculinity and Christianity, and she has written for The Nation and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. DAYO FOLAYAN GORE is a Ph.D. candidate in History at New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science, writing her dissertation on U.S. political culture and the organizing efforts of black women activists during the 1940s and 1950s. She is also a member of the Working Group on Police Violence at the Audre Lorde Project, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit and Transgender People of Color organizing center based in Brooklyn, and she is active in the New York City–based Coalition Against Police Brutality. AMY S. GREEN is Assistant Professor of Speech and Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. She holds a doctorate in theater from the CUNY Graduate School and University Center and is the author of The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Reinvent the Classics (Cambridge University Press, 1994). PAUL HOFFMAN practices civil rights law in Los Angeles. He is the outgoing chair of Amnesty International—USA chapter and former Legal Director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. He has written extensively on police brutality. ANDREW HSIAO is a senior editor at The Village Voice and an editor at The New Press, both in New York City. TAMARA JONES is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University . Her activist background includes work as a member of the Working Group on Police Violence at the Audre Lorde Project; as a union organizer for the Graduate Employees and Student Organization at Yale; as a member of the Black Radical Congress; and as a member of Caribbean Pride—an organization of LGBTs of Caribbean descent. Her other recent publications include “‘Top-Down’ or ‘Bottom-Up’?: Sexual Identities and Workers’ Rights in a Municipal Union,” in OutFront: Lesbians , Gays and the Struggle for Workplace Rights, ed. Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCreery (University of Minnesota Press, January 2001); “Fighting Homophobia versus Challenging Heterosexism: ‘The Failure to Transform’ Revisited,” co-authored with Cathy J. Cohen, in Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks, Gays in the Struggle for Equality, ed. Eric Brandt (New 290 CONTRIBUTORS Press, 1999); and “Women of Color in the Eighties: A Profile Based on Census Data,” co-authored with Alethia Jones in Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader, ed. Cathy J. Cohen, Kathleen B. Jones, and Joan C. Tronto (New York University Press, 1997). JOO-HYUN KANG is the founding Executive Director of The Audre Lorde Project, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit and Transgender People of Color organizing center based in Brooklyn, New York. ANDREA McARDLE teaches in the Lawyering Program and is the Coordinator of the Lawyering Theory...