Stop and Frisk: The Role of Police Strategies and
Tactics in Police-Community Relations
Speaker Biographies
Ronald L. Davis was appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder in November 2013 to head
the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services of the US Department of Justice. Davis’s
appointment follows eight years of serving the city of East Palo Alto as chief of police. Before
becoming chief, he served 20 years with the Oakland Police Department, where he rose to the
rank of captain and served in assignments including police academy director, criminal
investigations commander, patrol commander, and inspector general. In East Palo Alto, Davis
led an organizational reform and community-policing effort that increased public trust and
confidence in the police and achieved dramatic crime and violence reductions in a city once
dubbed “the murder capital of the United States.”
Davis earned a bachelor’s of science degree from Southern Illinois University. He completed
the Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program at the John F. Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard University.
Cathy L. Lanier has spent her entire law enforcement career with the Metropolitan Police
Department of the District of Columbia (MPD), beginning in 1990. After assuming leadership
of the MPD on January 2, 2007, Lanier was unanimously confirmed as the chief of police by
the Council of the District of Columbia on April 3, 2007. Lanier’s leadership lies in her
commitment to reducing violent crimes through the strong relationships she has fostered with
partners in the community and within the criminal justice system. Strengthened police–
community ties have opened avenues of communication, giving victims and witnesses the
courage to share valuable information that helps the MPD capture criminals. During her
tenure as chief, Washington, DC, has enjoyed a 42 percent drop in homicides.
Lanier is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration’s Drug Unit Commanders Academy. She holds bachelor's and master’s
degrees in management from Johns Hopkins University and a master's degree in national
security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
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Tracie L. Keesee is the cofounder and director of outreach for the Center for Policing Equity
(CPE), a research consortium that promotes police transparency and accountability by
facilitating innovative research collaborations between law enforcement agencies and social
scientists. Through those facilitated collaborations, CPE seeks to improve racial and gender
equity issues in policing—both within law enforcement agencies and between agencies and
the communities they serve.
A native of Denver, Colorado, and a 25-year police veteran, Keesee has authored publications
across several collected anthologies and peer-reviewed scientific journals. Keesee holds a
bachelor’s degree in political science from Metropolitan State College, academic certifications
in public policy and public administration from the University of Colorado at Denver, a
master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Colorado at Denver, and a PhD in
intercultural communications from the University of Denver. She is a graduate of the 203rd
class of the FBI National Academy.
Nancy G. La Vigne is director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she
leads a staff of over 40 researchers and oversees a research portfolio of more than three
dozen active projects spanning a wide array of crime, justice, and public safety topics. Before
being appointed director in 2009, La Vigne served for eight years as a senior research
associate at Urban, directing projects on prisoner reentry, crime prevention, policing, and
evaluation of criminal justice technologies.
Before joining Urban, La Vigne was the founding director of the Crime Mapping Research
Center at the National Institute of Justice, an agency of the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
She later served as special assistant to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice
Programs within DOJ. La Vigne’s interests focus on criminal justice evaluation, prisoner
reentry, policing, crime prevention, and spatial analysis of crime and criminal behavior. She has
published widely on these topics, and her writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly
journals and practitioner publications.
La Vigne holds a bachelor’s degree in government from Smith College, a master’s degree in
public affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at
Austin, and a PhD from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey.
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