Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant police misconduct attorney and organizer whose writing, litigation, and advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color for the past two decades. She is currently Researcher in Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she recently launched the Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action initiative. She is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Beacon Press 2017) She is a nationally recognized expert and sought-after commentator on policing issues, and works with groups across the country to support campaigns to end profiling, police violence criminalization, mass incarceration, and deportation. 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 a number of United Nations treaty bodies. Her articles and opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Essence, and the Guardian and she regularly appears in national media outlets, including HBO, BET, MSNBC, and NPR.

Ritchie has taught classes on Policing; Race, Gender, and Punishment; Black Feminism; Social Justice; and Human Rights at American University, Northeastern Law School, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ritchie was lead counsel in Tikkun v. City of New York, ground-breaking impact litigation challenging unlawful searches of transgender people in police custody, and drafted and negotiated sweeping changes to the NYPD’s policies for interactions with LGBTQ New Yorkers, and has since supported organizations and law enforcement agencies across the country in developing policies around police interactions with women and LGBTQ people.