Marc Krupanski works and writes on policing & security, community health & safety, and organizing, power & democracy. He is especially interested in viable, community-based solutions to safety, health, and justice, and building broad-based partnerships to make them a reality.
Currently, he is director of criminal justice – policing, with Arnold Ventures, where he leads efforts related to police accountability and the police response in the United States at national, state, and local levels.
Previously, Marc served as senior program officer with the Public Health Program of the Open Society Foundations, where he led a portfolio related to law enforcement, community safety, and public health. While the portfolio was global in focus, he supported various place-based and regional initiatives across 12 countries in the Americas, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and East Africa. Before joining the Public Health Program, he served as program officer with Open Society’s Justice Initiative, where he worked with civil society organizations and law enforcement agencies in Western Europe to prevent ethnic and racial profiling and to advance fair and effective policing. He also partnered with civil society organizations, United Nations agencies, and government officials to resolve statelessness in Southeast Asia and the Middle East in addition to designing emergent programmatic work on economic justice.
For several years, Marc worked on international security sector reform and governance with DCAF – Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance while based in Geneva, Switzerland. This included work on issues, such as: the domestic roles of armed forces, operationalization of a human security framework, and the conceptual and operational intersection of security sector reform with rule of law and international development.
In New York City, Marc worked for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where he focused on police and criminal justice reform and oversight. He developed CCR’s police misconduct portfolio through cases such as CCR’s landmark class-action litigation on stop-and-frisk and racial profiling (Daniels v City of New York and Floyd v City of New York), and by spearheading CCR’s legislative advocacy, data analysis, and coalition-building efforts. In addition, he worked on CCR’s dockets related to protest and assembly, racial justice, immigration detention, and national security. Marc also served as campaign organizer with Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), a New York City-wide and multi-organizational campaign to advance community safety and oversight of the New York Police Department, helping to pass the Community Safety Act. Additionally, he held a brief stint with the labor union UNITE-HERE, where he conducted public surveys and outreach related to a garment & retail workers unionization campaign. Finally, and mostly for fun, Marc moonlighted as a stats stringer for Major League Baseball where he was able to combine his love of baseball and statistics.
Marc began his involvement in political and social activism when he was 13 years old by participating in anti-death penalty vigils with his church youth group in front of state prisons when executions were being held. He found footing as well as a youth member at his local Boys & Girls Club. Marc later cut his teeth as a community organizer in the United States on various campaigns related to police and criminal justice, racial justice, immigration, and economic justice – ranging from police violence to domestic workers’ rights to international trade agreements. In addition, he conducted extensive solidarity work and research on community empowerment, security, health, and development in Mexico (Chiapas), Haiti, Cuba, and Diné territories.
Marc is a graduate with honors of New York University (New York, USA) and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland). He was awarded NYU’s Helen M. Jones Prize for best departmental thesis and highest academic ranking in the History Department. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Alpha Theta honor societies as well as the Police Executive Research Forum, the Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association, the American Society for Evidence-Based Policing, Surfrider Foundation, and the Society for American Baseball Research. Marc was a steering committee member of the International Grant Makers Network of Philanthropy New York. He is currently a contributing editor of the Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being. He also serves as a board member for a leading Colombian human rights NGO, Temblores.
Marc is an author of several academic and research articles and chapters, policy briefs, and editorial commentary. His writing and interviews have appeared in diverse outlets ranging from academic journals to government policy briefs to advocacy blogs and reports, such as The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Vice, The Hill, Stat, The Jordan Times, Project Syndicate, and The Crime Report, as well as by the National Defense University and MIT Press, among others.
You can follow him on Twitter: @mkrupanski.
Marc Krupanski 