Andrea Ritchie

Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney and organizer on profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women, girls and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people of color in the US and. She currently coordinates Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at sharing “know your rights” information, strategies for safety and visions for change among LGBT youth of color who experience of gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization in the context of “quality of life” initiatives and the policing of sex work and trafficking. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) and has also been a member of the national collective of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Ritchie is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011), Her other writings include Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color, in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! anthology (2006, South End Press); and In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States, a “shadow report” submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; Caught in the Net, a report on women and the “war on drugs” published by the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Break the Chains, and Education Not Deportation: Impacts of New York City School Safety Policies on Immigrant Youth, published by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM). Her most recent book, Violence Every Day: Racial Profiling and Police Brutality Against Women, Girls and Transgender People of Color, will be coming out next year from South End Press.