Alice Green, executive director Center for Law and Justice in Albany

Alice Green, founder and executive director of the Center for Law and Justice in Albany, talks in this week’s podcast, about structural racism that affects not just our criminal justice system but everything from our schools to our health-care system. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of a Florida jury finding George Zimmerman, a white man, not guilty of any crimes despite his shooting and killing an unarmed black youth, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Green wrote a paper, “Pathway To Change: African Americans and Community Policing in Albany.” In it, she details the decades of racial tensions between the Albany police department and the community it serves, going back to the 1984 police killing of Jesse Davis, a mentally ill, unarmed black man, in his Arbor Hill home. Police officers claimed they had to shoot Davis because he came at them with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, and a grand jury cleared police of any wrongdoing. “A police department photograph uncovered years later showed Davis’s lifeless body clutching only a key case in one hand and a toy truck in the other,” Green wrote. She continues to work for change, and currently the center’s website features responses from Albany leaders to the center’s recommendations. — Photo from the Center for Law and Justice website

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