Matthew Barge

Senior Policing Fellow

Matthew Barge is a police practices and civil rights expert with more than 15 years of experience working with law enforcement agencies, city governments, and communities on public safety challenges. From 2015 through 2019, he served as the federal court-appointed Monitor overseeing a federal consent decree involving the police in Cleveland. He is a lead subject matter expert on the federal monitoring team overseeing a consent decree in Baltimore. He also serves as lead police practices expert to a retired federal judge overseeing an agreement between the City of Chicago and American Civil Liberties Union addressing issues related to "stop and frisk."

Mr. Barge supervised the court-appointed monitoring team overseeing a federal consent decree in Seattle as the Team’s Deputy Monitor. He has engaged in significant assessment and implementation projects for departments and communities including Mesa, Arizona; Los Angeles and Pasadena, California; Denver, Colorado; Farmington, New Mexico; Walkill, New York; and Portland, Oregon. He has conducted exhaustive reviews of high-profile use of force incidents for the University of California, Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District and made recommendations for improving policy and procedure in each instance.

A lawyer, Mr. Barge previously worked as a litigator specializing in complex, multi-district litigation at the law firms of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan in New York City. He is a graduate of N.Y.U. School of Law and Georgetown University.