The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice has a dedicated staff with deep experience in working to transform relationships between communities and the criminal justice system.
Alex Zuur is a Field Advisor for Field Innovations at the National Network for Safe Communities. She primarily works on the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice and provides technical assistance and support to these partner police departments on ways to improve their relationships with their communities. She is also responsible for developing the reconciliation framework for this project.
Prior to this work she managed a community-based court diversion Restorative Justice program in Vancouver, Canada where she facilitated more than 200 victim-offender dialogue processes and developed the province’s first Restorative Justice Standards of Practice. She has also worked as a frontline social worker in prisons, a street outreach worker, a trauma informed yoga teacher, and as an addictions counsellor.
Ms. Zuur has a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of British Columbia, where she graduated first in her class, and holds a Masters of Social Work from Columbia University.
Danneile Davis is a Field Advisor on the NNSC’s Field Innovations Team. She co-leads technical assistance on the design and development of police-community trust building strategies at six cities across the country, particularly on fostering police-community reconciliation, promoting procedural justice, and addressing implicit bias. Her specific portfolio focuses on supporting survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual violence, LGBTQIA persons, immigrants, the Latinx community, and Native Americans, as well as youth mentoring initiatives to support positive police-youth engagement.
Prior to joining the National Network, Ms. Davis worked as an Associate Consultant at Bain and Company in Chicago, IL where she crafted an operational improvement strategy and key performance indicators at for a $7B industrial client, and developed a 10-year growth strategy for a national, education-based nonprofit. At Bain, she also led undergraduate minority consulting recruitment at Penn and advised on Bain minority retention strategy. Outside Bain, she volunteered as a rape crisis advocate for the YWCA in Chicago, where she still volunteers in an offsite capacity.
Ms. Davis holds a BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude.
Jesse Jannetta is a senior policy fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he leads projects on prison and jail reentry, community-based violence reduction strategies, and community supervision. He is the project director for the Safety and Justice Challenge Innovation Fund and co-leads the Risk Assessment Clearinghouse Project. He was previously project director for the Transition from Jail to Community initiative and co-principal investigator for evaluations of the Los Angeles Gang Reduction and Youth Development strategy and the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy. He applies mixed-methods approaches to process and impact evaluations and provides direct technical assistance to jurisdictions improving justice system functioning.
Before joining Urban, Jannetta was a research specialist at the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections at the University of California, Irvine. He conducted several projects, including an evaluation of GPS monitoring for sex offender parolees, an analysis of parole discharge and violation response policies, and an analysis of the role of the Division of Juvenile Justice in the California juvenile justice system, measuring the scope of correctional control in California and assessing inmate and parolee programs in terms of evidence-based program design principles.
Jannetta holds a BA in political science from the University of Michigan and an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Sue-Lin Wong is the Associate Project Director of the National Initiative for Building Commuity Trust and Justice, and the Managing Director of Field Innovations at the National Network for Safe Communities. Ms. Wong participated in the team that launched the National Network. She leads the strategic planning for direct technical assistance and support for the National Network's partner jurisdictions utilizing emerging interventions, and provides strategic advising and data management to those sites.
During her tenure at the National Network, Ms. Wong also held a research fellow position at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University, where she conducted policy analysis on the state of death penalty reforms in Taiwan, prepared written reports for the Ford Foundation, developed strategies for working in China, fostered partnerships between academic institutes in China and research institutes in the US, and developed empirical research approaches for future pilot projects. Prior to that, Ms. Wong was an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice through the school's undergraduate honors program.
Ms. Wong received her MA in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and her BS in Psychology from State University of New York, Buffalo.
Rachel Teicher is the Project Director of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. Ms. Teicher oversees all National Initiative research and strategic implementation in its six pilot sites.
Prior to joining the National Network, Ms. Teicher worked as the Director of Strategic Coordination in the New York City Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. She helped develop new initiatives in concert with various community partners and was responsible for managing the agency’s four Self-Sufficiency programs focusing on a wide range of survivor concerns. While at the Mayor’s Office, Ms. Teicher was also part of the administrative team that oversaw the Brooklyn Family Justice Center. Ms. Teicher also served as the Outreach Director in the Office of External Affairs at the New York City Department of Social Services where she developed and managed a new community outreach initiative addressing issues of economic inequality, food insecurity, and emergency assistance. Ms. Teicher previously worked with STEPS to End Family Violence and Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program.
Teicher holds a law degree from Hofstra University, a master's degree in humanities and social thought from New York University, and a bachelor's degree in sociology from Haverford College.
Kristen Powell is a project coordinator and the Center for Policing Equity's site contact for the National Initiative. Kristen has been working with CPE since 2016. Kristen's background is in sociology with specific focus on areas of power, inequality, and its impacts on social identity. Her research experience has also included studies on white allyship, racial identity, and contemporary social movements.
As part of the National Initiative, the Center for Policing Equity has been dedicated to the implementation of Procedural Justice 3 trainings (focusing on stereotypes and identity traps) in departments, as well as the development of a community-facing procedural justice training. CPE has also provided policy analyses for each NI site, and will be producing a final report for each city upon the completion of this project in March 2019. To learn more about CPE's city reports and our National Justice Database, please go to policingequity.org
