Name: Andrei

Social Justice Group: 2018-2019, Race & Policing

Date of Fieldwork: January 8, 2019

Name of Organization: Vera Institute of Justice

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Mawia Khogali

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did:

Our group traveled to the Woolworth Building to interview Mawia Khogali who works at Vera as a research associate in Vera’s Policing Program.

What I learned:

One thing that I learned is that when Mawia was talking about marginalized groups besides the black community she brought up the disabled community, most importantly, the deaf community. One statistic we gave is that about ⅓ of deaths by police have some hearing disability and ½ with mental health.

What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:

One thing we learned about our social justice work is that we got a little more perspective from the officers point of. She told us about the police based “hierarchy” and we learned that if you are a police officer and you support a marginalized group, then fellow officers would maybe think less of you. For example, there was a man who was a police officer, and wanted to become the chief, but he seen in a black lives matter march, which made it hard for him to get the promotion to chief because some of his fellow police officers no longer supported him.