Black and Brown in Blue is a lecture series that builds a bridge between the community and law enforcement for a more inclusive community environment. The program was designed to encourage open and honest dialogue in order to reduce barriers and misperceptions.

Jeff Reisig is currently one of California’s longest-serving District Attorneys. First elected as the Yolo County DA in 2006, Reisig had previously worked as a deputy district attorney for almost a decade. As a career prosecutor, he has personally handled thousands of criminal cases, with a specialty in homicides and organized crime.

In collaboration with Stanford University, Reisig helped design and fully integrate a Race Blind Charging program into his digital case management system so that his office’s decisions about whether to charge someone with a crime or not could be made without any knowledge of the race of the parties involved. This ground-breaking development inspired legislation that was signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022, making it a statewide requirement for all 58 county DA’s offices.  

Reisig was also the first prosecutor in the nation to launch a third-party hosted data-transparency portal in collaboration with the national reform organization Measures for Justice. The portal provides the public nearly unrestricted access to criminal justice data from his office, while also giving community members a platform to directly share their findings and engage policy makers and the media on the data. As a result of this work, Reisig is widely recognized as a national leader and advocate for criminal justice transparency.

For more information about this event, contact mo.phillips@sonoma.edu.