Re: Appointment of Chief Ron Davis as Director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

Recipient: The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.

The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Attorney General Holder:

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 210 national organizations, we write to express our strong support for the appointment of Chief Ron Davis as Director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). Chief Davis’s stellar background, his keen intellect, his commitment to justice, and his national recognition as an expert on community policing strategies to reduce crime all make him an ideal candidate. We urge his swift appointment as Director of the Office of COPS.

Chief Davis’s credentials are truly outstanding. He graduated from Southern Illinois University and has completed the Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has been the Chief of Police for the City of East Palo Alto since 2005. As Chief of Police, he has led an organizational reform and community-policing effort that has increased public trust and confidence and achieved dramatic crime and violence reductions in a city once dubbed the murder capital of the United States. Under Chief Davis’s leadership, homicides in East Palo Alto have dropped by over 50%, overall crime is down over 20%, and police and community relations have notably improved.

Chief Davis has also served on two federal monitoring teams with oversight of police-reform consent decrees between the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Washington, D.C. and Detroit Police Departments. He is a former Senior Advisor to the Police Assessment Resource Center and currently serves as a police-reform expert for the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. In this capacity, Chief Davis has participated in several DOJ constitutional “patterns and practice” investigations of police departments throughout the United States.

The Leadership Conference is confident that Chief Davis will take a highly thoughtful approach to difficult issues and be an effective leader of the Office of COPS and its goal of advancing community policing. His experience and expertise will be an asset to this program, which has been a factor in reducing violent crime rates during the past ten years.

We urge you to swiftly appoint Chief Davis as Director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact either of us or Senior Counsel Lexer Quamie at (202) 466-3311.

Sincerely,

Wade Henderson
President & CEO

Nancy Zirkin
Executive Vice President