Charles H. Ramsey was appointed Police Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department on January 7, 2008 by Mayor Michael Nutter and served until his retirement in 2016. A native of Chicago, Illinois, Commissioner Ramsey served in the Chicago Police Department for nearly three decades in a variety of assignments. He began his career in 1968, at the age of 18, as a Chicago Police cadet. He became a police officer in February 1971, and was promoted through the ranks, eventually serving as commander of patrol, detectives and narcotics units. In 1994, he was named Deputy Superintendent of the Bureau of Staff Services, where he managed the department’s education and training, research and development, labor affairs, crime prevention and professional counseling functions. 

Prior to his appointment in Philadelphia, he served as the Chief of Police of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department from 1998 to 2006. Ramsey was the longest serving chief of the Metropolitan Police Department since DC Home Rule and the second longest-serving in the Department’s history. Under then Chief Ramsey’s leadership, the Department regained its reputation as a national leader in urban policing. Crime rates declined by approximately 40 percent during his tenure, community policing and traffic safety programs were expanded, and MPDC recruiting and hiring standards, training, equipment, facilities and fleet were all dramatic upgraded. He also oversaw and participated in numerous high profile investigations and events in Washington DC, such as: The 1998 murders of two United States Capitol Police officers inside the U.S. Capitol Building; The Y2K National Celebration in Washington, DC; The International Monetary Fund/World Bank Protests in April, 2000; The Chandra Levy Murder Investigation, The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks, The 2001 Anthrax Attacks; The 2002 DC Sniper Investigation; The funeral of President Ronald W. Reagan and the 2001 and 2005 Presidential Inaugurations. 

Commissioner Ramsey holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in criminal justice from Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois. He is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the National Executive Institute. After his retirement from the Washington DC Police Department, he served as a member of the Independent Commission on Security Forces of Iraq, led by now National Security Advisor General James L. Jones, and also led the group of law enforcement professionals that reviewed the Iraqi police forces which garnered international attention for their work. He completed the Executive Leadership Program at the Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Homeland Defense and Security in February 2008. 

Commissioner Ramsey has lectured nationally on community policing and is seen as an expert in the area of policing and homeland security. He currently serves as President of the Police Executive Research Forum, First Vice President of the Major Cities Chiefs, and is a member of the Executive Committee for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. He now serves on the National Advisory Council for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), comprising experts in the field of emergency preparedness, management and response. 

Michael Harrison was sworn in as the Baltimore Police Department’s 41st Commissioner on March 12, 2019. Before coming to Baltimore, Commissioner Harrison served the New Orleans Police Department for nearly 28 years. He joined the NOPD in 1991 and moved steadily through the ranks. Among his many assignments, he was the supervisor of the Public Integrity Bureau, Assistant Commander of the Seventh District, Commander of the Specialized Investigations Division, and Commander of the Seventh District. In 2014, he was appointed Superintendent and served in that role for four years. 
  
Commissioner Harrison honorably served eight years with the Louisiana Air National Guard. He received a Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Phoenix and a Masters of Criminal Justice from Loyola University New Orleans. He is also a graduate of the Senior Management Institute for Police, as well as Northwestern University's School of Police Staff and Command, and also graduated from the F.B.I’s National Executive Institute. Additionally, he is a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Major City Chiefs Association, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives and the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force. In 2019, he was appointed to the board of directors of the Police Executive Research Forum.  
  
Commissioner Harrison has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1992. They have two adult children and are now proud residents of Baltimore. 

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an Associate Professor at Indiana University. 

Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality and criminal justice in modern U.S. history. He is co-editor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the Journal of American History (June 2015), and a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, as well as the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies. 

Much of his work has been featured in national print and broadcast media outlets, including the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, The Nation, National Public Radio, Moyers and Company, and MSNBC. He has appeared in a number of feature-length documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated 13th (2016) and Slavery by Another Name (2012). Khalil was an associate editor of The Journal of American History and prior Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society. In 2017, he received the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University’s Teachers College. He holds two honorary doctorates and is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice, The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Nation magazine, as well as the advisory boards of Cure Violence, Common Justice, The HistoryMakers and the Lapidus Center for the Study of Transatlantic Slavery. 

Khalil is an award-winning teacher at Harvard and has received numerous honors for his commitment to public engagement, including BPI Chicago’s Champion of the Public Interest Award (2018), The Fortune Society’s Game Changer Award (2017), Ebony Power 100 (2013), The Root 100 of Black Influencers (2012-2014), and Crain’s New York Business magazine 40 under 40 (2011). 

A native of Chicago’s South Side, Khalil graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Economics in 1993, and then joined Deloitte & Touche, LLP, as a staff accountant until entering graduate school. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Rutgers University. 

Mitch Landrieu is a best-selling author, speaker, advisor, and the former Mayor of the City of New Orleans. When Landrieu was sworn in as the 61st Mayor of New Orleans, he inherited a city still recovering from Hurricane Katrina and in the midst of the BP Oil Spill.  Under Landrieu's leadership, New Orleans is widely recognized as one of the nation’s great comeback stories.

In 2015, Landrieu was was named “Public Official of the Year” by Governing, and in 2016 was voted “America’s top turnaround mayor” in a survey of mayors, compiled by Politico. He gained national prominence for his powerful decision to take down four Confederate monuments in New Orleans. The courage and leadership Landrieu showed in advocating and overseeing the removal of the statues also earned him the prestigious John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. 

In his New York Times best-selling book, In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, Landrieu recounts his personal journey confronting racism, and tackles the broader history of slavery, race relations, and institutional inequalities that still plague America. Growing up in a politically active and socially conscious family, Landrieu’s political roots run deep in Louisiana, where he served two terms as lieutenant governor and 16 years in the state legislature. He also served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Mitch and his wife Cheryl have five children.