Delores Jones-Brown
Dudley Flood Endowed Distinguished Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Criminal Justice
Phone: 910-672-1569
Email: djonesbrown@uncfsu.edu
Room: LTB 314
Delores Jones-Brown, J.D., Ph.D., is a Dudley Flood Endowed Distinguished Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Criminal Justice at Fayetteville State University.
She is retired from the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). She was the founding director of the John Jay College Center on Race, Crime and Justice and is Professor Emeritus on the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research and legal commentary focus on race and the administration of justice, with special attention to policing, police-community relations, and police use of deadly force.
Dr. Jones-Brown engages in research, activism and consulting aimed at affecting change in the operation of the criminal legal system, particularly its interaction with and impact on communities of color.
She is a charter member of the executive board of the Center for Policing Equity (Center for Policing Equity), a research consortium that promotes police transparency and accountability by facilitating innovative research collaborations between law enforcement agencies and social scientists. She was appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to serve on the consent decree monitoring teams for Ferguson, Missouri and Newark, New Jersey. She has served as an advisor to the New York State Police-on-Police Shooting Task Force and the New York State Attorney General’s Report on Arrests Resulting from the New York City Police Department’s Stop, Question and Frisk Practices. She was invited to give testimony before President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Her remarks on community policing are published in the final report (Final Report of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing). As Director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, she was lead author on two highly cited reports that exposed the unwarranted racial disparities in the stop-question-and-frisk practices of the NYPD. The 2010 report is cited in U.S. v. Griffin, decided by the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Recently, she has been selected to serve as a member of the Board of Advisors to the Disparity in the Justice System research project funded by the National Institute of Justice, hosted by Arizona State University. She is an invited contributor to the Criminal Law Bulletin, covering legal and public policy developments related to policing. She is also the section editor on Policing and Criminal Justice for the Racism by Context digital project currently underway by Oxford University Press (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia on Race, Crime and Justice (forthcoming) by Bloomsbury (with Christine Barrow, Molloy University).
Dr. Jones-Brown is the author of Race, Crime and Punishment, winner of a “best books” New York Public Library award and required reading for the New York City Public School System in 2000-2001. Her publications also include seven co-edited volumes, the most recent of which is: Over-policing Black Bodies: The Need for Multidimensional and Transformative Reforms (Routledge, 2023) (with Jason M. Williams, Montclair State University), adopted from a special issue of the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 19(3-4) (Taylor and Francis, 2021).
Dr. Jones-Brown has been the recipient of several honors and awards, including the Rutgers University medal for being a “revolutionary thinker” and the Western Society of Criminology’s Founders Award. The award honors “a person who, through scholarship and/or activism, has significantly improved the quality of justice in the United States.”
In addition to her career as an academic. Dr. Jones-Brown has spent time as a criminal justice practitioner in multiple areas. She is a former assistant professor in Monmouth County, New Jersey where she was also a certified police academy instructor. She has worked in community-based and institutional corrections; developed a mentoring program for court-involved youth; trained health and hospital police on the law as it relates to the defense of justification and the use of force. She also helped develop law-related education programs for youth in the U.S. and Mexico.
Dr. Jones-Brown has provided commentary on race and justice matters for many media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, Mother Jones, Yahoo News, Newsy, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post; and has made guest appearances on TV One’s documentary crime series “For My Man.” Currently she appears in the Firelight Films documentary, “Sound of the Police,” streaming on Hulu since August 2023. The film addresses the topic of race and police violence.