One of the big campaign promises Joe Biden made last summer as Americans took to the streets to demand racial justice was policing reform. He had to walk a careful line between activists who wanted to defund the police and many others who wanted to make more modest adjustments to police policies. Now, caught in the middle, the risk is the new administration might end up accomplishing far less than it should.

The Policing Project and the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of Virginia School of Law have released clear and actionable recommendations the new Administration can pursue as part of a national commitment to sound policing, largely by taking a regulatory approach to national policing policy.

The Policing Project has outlined guiding principles and initial concrete steps for jurisdictions to begin the process of reimagining what the police response should be and how to achieve public safety through decreased enforcement methods and increased social interventions.

Policing Project Co-Founders Barry Friedman and Maria Ponomarenko joined a coalition of law school faculty — each of whom runs or is associated with a center devoted to the practice of policing and the criminal justice system — in releasing a list of urgently-needed reforms to address enduring problems in American policing.

How do we know what works in policing and what doesn’t? Often, the answer is, “We don’t.” As Policing Project Faculty Director Barry Friedman and extern Kate Mather explain in a new editorial for Just Security, evidence-based policing is still a niche approach struggling to find its place in mainstream law enforcement.

Policing Project Director Barry Friedman recently sat down with Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for a conversation on the intersection of race and policing.