People: Staff

Tracie L. Keesee is a Denver Colorado native and 20 year veteran with the Denver Police Department (DPD). She is currently the Deputy Director of the Colorado Information Analysis Center (CIAC) and the co-founder and Executive Director of Operations for the Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity.  Her previous assignments include Division Chief of Research, Training and Technology, Patrol Districts 3 and 5 as Commander, Detective in Crimes Against Persons, the Public Information Officer for the Chief, Internal Affairs, the Police Training Academy, the Gang Bureau and Commander of the Information Technology Development Unit.
She is currently assigned as the Department of Homeland Security/ UASI Director for Denver. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of Operations for the Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity. Her previous assignments include, Division Chief of Research, Training and Technology, Patrol Districts 3 and 5 as Commander, Detective in Crimes Against Persons, the Public Information Officer for the Chief, Internal Affairs, the Police Training Academy, the Gang Bureau and Commander of the Information Technology Development Unit.

Dr. Keesee holds a BA in Political Science from Metropolitan State College, Academic certifications in Public Policy and Public Administration from the University of Colorado at Denver, an MA in Criminal Justice from the University of Colorado at Denver and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver in Intercultural Communications. She is a graduate of the 203rd class of the FBI National Academy, and the 1994 class of the African-American Leadership Institute.

Demonstrating a strong understanding of the need for community partnerships, Dr. Keesee has implemented the following programs: Montebello’s first community store front located in the Villages a Gateway; the literacy program, “The Reading Police;” Law Related Education (officer and teacher teams) in Martin Luther King Middle School, Omar Blair, and Montbello High Schools; Neighborhood Police Officers; Yes I Can Program (Gang Awareness program for youth transitioning from middle to high school); and the Latch Key Kids Project. Dr. Keesee also has an impressive list of publications across several collected anthologies and peer-reviewed scientific journals–all in the area of justice and law enforcement.

Website

Dr. Goff is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the co-founder and executive director for research of the Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity. He is an expert in contemporary forms of racial bias and discrimination as well as the intersections of race and gender. He has conducted groundbreaking work exploring the ways in which racial prejudice is not a necessary precondition for racial discrimination. That is, despite the normative conceptualization of racial discrimination—that it stems naturally from prejudiced explicit or implicit attitudes—Dr. Goff’s research demonstrates that contextual factors can facilitate racially unequal outcomes. Dr. Goff’s work has been recognized by NIMH, SPSSI, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is also the youngest member of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice advisory board for the Center on Race, Crime, and Justice. Dr. Goff has been recognized as a national leader in race and gender discrimination by legal practitioners as well, having served as an expert witness in several prominent regional and national cases. Most recently, Dr. Goff has been recognized as the emerging leader in research on race, gender, and policing. Dr. Goff spent the 2008-2009 academic year as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.  Dr. Goff is the 2009 Early Career Award Recipient for APA’s Division 9 and Division 48.

Website

Meredith was born and raised in Los Angeles, and received her Bachelors degree in Business and Communication from the University of Southern California. Prior to returning to Los Angeles to receive her Masters in Social Work, she lived in New York and worked in the fashion industry. Meredith became interested in policing while interning in the juvenile courts for the public defender. She is now the Deputy Director at the CPLE.

Email

Kavita S. Reddy was born in Canada and raised in the Los Angeles area. She studied Psychology and Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) prior to moving to New York for her graduate studies in Psychology at Columbia University. Dr. Reddy returned home for postdoctoral work with Dr. Goff at UCLA. Her research interests center around contextual influences on identity processes (particularly racial and ethnic identity), and she is currently focusing on these interests in lab and field-based work with the CPLE. 

Email

Tali has BAs in Psychology and Philosophy and Law, and practiced law for several years as a criminal and constitutional lawyer. As a social psychologist, her research centers upon social justice, legitimacy, and rule-following. She received her PhD from New York University, where she worked with Tom Tyler, John Jost and Yaccov Trope. Her research looks at how people’s perceptions of what is fair affect their perceptions of and reactions to social, legal, political, and public policy issues. In particular she studies how procedural justice is involved in perception of power, power distance, and organizational hierarchy or equality.

Email

Karin D. Martin was born in Brooklyn and raised in Southwest Virginia. She studied Psychology at Stanford University and worked in a variety of non-profit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area before attending University of California, Berkeley where she earned an MPP, an MA in Political Science, and her PhD in Public Policy. Her research interests include the cognitive bases of support for punitive crime policy and heuristics in decision-making in the realm of criminal justice.

Email

During her time as an Emerging Scholar, Liana Epstein was a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University. Her research examines the psychological underpinnings and consequences of social policy in both domestic and international contexts. Her work with the CPLE focuses on how immigration policy influences law enforcement. This research is currently being funded by the National Science Foundation, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Amanda Armour is the Senior Project Coordinator for the Consortium for Policing Leadership in Equity. She received her B.A. in Psychology at Northwestern and her M.A. at Yale. 

Email

Summer Robins is the Research Manager for the Consortium of Police Leadership in Equity. She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Duke University and acquired research experience in the Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center at Duke University and the Adaptlab at the University of California, Irvine.

Email

Franccesca Kazerooni was born and raised in the Los Angeles area.  She recently received her B.A. in Psychology at Claremont McKenna College.  Franccesca hopes to pursue a PhD in Social Psychology focusing primarily on prejudice and intergroup relations within an online context.

Email

Diane Motamed is the Junior Project Coordinator for the Consortium for Policing Leadership in Equity. She recently received her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Applied Developmental Psychology at UCLA and previously acquired research experience in the Language and Cognitive Development Lab at UCLA and Shared Action at the AIDS Project Los Angeles.

Email