Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She is the author of Practicing New Worlds: Abolition & Emergent Strategies, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and co-author of  Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, and the forthcoming No More Police: A Case for Abolition. She co-founded the Interrupting Criminalization initiative with Mariame Kaba, as well as the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people. She currently hosts the Invest/Divest Learning Communities at the Community Resource Hub, and supports dozens of organizations across the US working to divest from policing and invest in community safety. She has authored numerous research reports, articles, and opinion pieces on policing, criminalization, mass incarceration and immigration enforcement.

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She is a past member of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, and was a founding member of the Steering Committee of New York City's Communities United for Police Reform, a city-wide campaign to challenge discriminatory, unlawful and abusive policing practices in New York City led by grassroots community groups, legal organizations, policy advocates and researchers from all five boroughs. She was appointed to the New York City Council Young Women's Initiative in 2015, where she co-chaired the Anti-Violence and Criminalization Working Group. She was a 2014 Senior Soros Justice fellow, and a recent Senior Fellow at the Invisible Institute. 

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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 across the country in developing policies around police interactions with women and LGBTQ people. She also served as co-counsel to the Center for Constitutional Rights in Doe v. Jindal, a successful challenge to Louisiana’s requirement that individuals convicted of “crime against nature by solicitation” register as sex offenders, and Doe v. Caldwell, the class action filed to remove all affected individuals from the registry, resulting in relief for over 800 class members. In Adkins v. City of New York, she secured a groundbreaking ruling that law enforcement discrimination against transgender people is subject to heightened constitutional scrutiny. In addition to impact litigation, she maintained a small practice focused on challenging police profiling and brutality against women and LGBTQ people of color in New York City for 15 years.
 
As a member of the national collective of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence from 2003 – 2008, she served on the editorial collective for the Color of Violence Anthology, and coordinated the development of the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Organizer’s Toolkit on Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color and Transgender People of Color.
 
Ritchie was also a primary author of In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States, a “shadow report” submitted on behalf of over 100 national and local organizations and individuals to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Additionally, as a consultant to the U.S. Human Rights Network, she coordinated the participation of over 200 local, state and national organizations in the 2008 review of the U.S. government’s compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
 
She also served as expert consultant, lead researcher and coauthor for Amnesty International’s 2005 report Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States, was a consultant for 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 co-author of Education Not Deportation: Impacts of New York City School Safety Policies on Immigrant Youth, published by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM).
 
She is a proud graduate of Howard University School of Law and had the privilege of clerking for the Honorable Emmet G. Sullivan on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

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You can book Andrea as a speaker here.