use both this parameter and |birth_date to display the person's date of birth, date of death, and age at death) -->| death_place = | death_cause = | body_discovered = | resting_place = | resting_place_coordinates = | burial_place = | burial_coordinates = | monuments = | nationality = | other_names = | siglum = | citizenship = | education = | alma_mater = Cornell University
Howard University (JD)| occupation = Author, lawyer, activist | years_active = | era = | employer = | organization = | known_for = | notable_works = Invisible No More| style = | title = | term = | predecessor = | successor = | party = | movement = | opponents = | boards = | criminal_charges = | criminal_penalty = | criminal_status = | spouse = | partner = | children = | parents = | mother = | father = | relatives = | family = | callsign = | awards = | website = | module = | module2 = | module3 = | module4 = | module5 = | module6 = | signature = | signature_size = | signature_alt = | footnotes = }}
Andrea J. Ritchie is a writer, lawyer, and activist for women of color, especially LGBTQ women of color, who have been victims of police violence.[1] [2] An abolitionist, her activism consists of demand for the elimination of police and prisons.[3] She is the author of Invisible No More, a history of state violence against women of color, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Mariame Kaba.
Ritchie attended Cornell University and Howard University School of Law.[4] She clerked for Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.[5]
Ritchie is a Researcher-in-Residence at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.[6] Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Teen Vogue, and Essence.[7] [8] [9] In 2018, Ritchie co-authored the report with Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum (Haymarket 2016).[10] In 2022 she published No More Police: A Case for Abolition which she co-authored with Mariame Kaba. In No More Police she provides some details on events in her life that made her a prison and police abolitionist, lays out arguments for why policing should be abolished, and discusses methods of creating safety without police.[11]
In 2017, Ritchie published Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.[12] In it, she gives a history of often-obscured state violence against women of color in the United States, beginning in the colonial period and continuing through the present, discussing how the historical precedent established current conditions.[13] She ties practices in colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow to contemporary policing frameworks including broken windows policing and the wars on drugs, immigration, and terror. In a review for Policing and Society, Robert Nicewarner found four major contributions Ritchie made with the book: demonstrating the historically contingent and structural nature of police violence against women of color; the development of “mixed” methodology interweaving statistics and personal stories; demonstrating the insufficiency of police response to violence against women of color; and demonstrating the “dire need to resist and reform” these issues.[14]