Brandon del Pozo, PhD, MPA, MA, is an assistant professor of medicine and health policy at Brown University. He presently conducts NIH-funded research on the effects of the justice system, especially policing, on the health of people who use drugs, people with mental illness, and other comorbidities. Prior to research, he spent 23 years as a police officer: 19 in the NYPD, where he rose through the ranks from a patrol officer and supervisor in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to command two patrol precincts in the Bronx and Manhattan, and assist in the department’s leadership for strategic initiatives and its office of policy and planning. Del Pozo then spent four years as the Chief of Police of Burlington, Vermont, the state’s largest city, where he received the Police Executive Research Forum’s Gary Hayes Award for his innovation and leadership. His doctorate is in political philosophy, where his work examined the principles and commitments of policing a democracy, which culminated in the publication of The Police and the State: Security, Social Cooperation, and the Public Good by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Del Pozo is an elected member of the Council on Criminal Justice, an executive fellow at the National Policing Institute, and a LEAD Scholar at the National Institute of Justice. His popular writing on policing and criminal justice has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, and Vital City.
