The Speaker

Lorenzo M. Boyd, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized leader in police-community relations and an authority on urban policing, diversity issues in criminal justice, race and crime, and criminal justice systems. He currently serves as the Director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven, CT. Dr. Boyd also serves as the University of New Haven’s Assistant Provost for Diversity & Inclusion.

He served for 14 years as a Sheriff’s Deputy in the Suffolk County (Mass.) Sheriff’s Department which shaped his approach to teaching, research, and training of police commanders and officers.

As director of the University of New Haven’s Center for Advanced Policing, Dr. Boyd is working to build the center into a national resource for professional development, with a central focus on building levels of empathy and cultural competence among police leaders and officers. He’s reaching out to police chiefs, and command staff around the country to determine their training needs and is developing interactive professional development that include real-life scenarios and role playing.

A former president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Science and a life member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), Dr. Boyd has appeared on local, regional, and national media outlets to discuss policing in the aftermath of high-profile cases, including shootings in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Ferguson, Missouri. In 2019, he led a study addressing issues of racism, bias, and police and community relations at Yale University after a white graduate student called the police to report a black graduate student who was asleep in a residence hall common room.

The Workshop

Weaponizing the Police- Profiling By Proxy : Friday, October 01, 2021 10:30A

When an individual calls the police and makes false or ill-informed claims of misconduct about persons they dislike or are biased against—e.g., ethnic and religious minorities, youth, homeless people—police must be careful to avoid “profiling by proxy”.

At worst, the public’s use of law enforcement to confront minorities can be viewed as “weaponizing the police.” Even when no explicit animus is present, such encounters may constitute a form of profiling: profiling by proxy. Without proper leadership and guidelines, a biased caller’s inferences can generate accusatory claims by police, outraged denials of wrongdoing by the accused, and cause police to unwittingly couple themselves with the biases of third parties whose intentions are opaque.