Lynda Garcia

Lynda Garcia is the policing campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund. In this role, she oversees the New Era of Public Safety initiative to promote fair, safe and effective policing through collaborative reform. In March of 2019, the Education Fund published a comprehensive report to help build trust between communities and police departments, restore confidence and reimagine a new paradigm of public safety. The report, New Era of Public Safety: A Guide to Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing, provides communities, police departments and lawmakers with policy recommendations for best practices to enhance accountability, build trust and improve public and officer safety. The recommendations are adaptable to every department, in every community across the nation. The goals are to advance policing practices that respect and protect human life and ensure safety for all.

Before joining the Leadership Conference, Garcia served as a trial attorney in the Special Litigation Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, where she conducted pattern-or-practice investigations of law enforcement agencies and enforced consent decrees to ensure constitutional, bias-free policing. Prior to the Civil Rights Division, Garcia worked at the ACLU national office and the ACLU of New Jersey challenging discriminatory police practices in communities of color. In her role as a civil rights attorney and policing expert, Garcia has worked collaboratively with communities and police officials across the country. She has testified before Congress on best practices in policing and for congressional briefings to promote a new era of public safety and advance 21st century best practice in policing. In addition to authoring the New Era of Public Safety, Garcia is coauthor of The War on Marijuana in Black and White, a national study documenting racial disparities in marijuana arrests.

Garcia graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College and cum laude from Fordham Law School. After law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge John Gleeson in the Eastern District of New York.