Phillip Atiba Goff


Phillip Atiba Goff is a psychologist known for researching the relationship between race and policing in the United States. He was appointed the inaugural Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2016, the college's first endowed professorship.

Early life

Goff earned an AB from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Career

Goff has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and an associate professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Goff is the co-founder and president of the research center/think tank Center for Policing Equity, which conducts research with the aim of ensuring accountable and racially unbiased policing in the United States. CPE is the host of a National Science Foundation-funded effort to collect national data on police behavior called the National Justice Database. The analytic framework Goff developed as part of the NJD has been called a potential model for police data accountability nationally. In 2016, a decade after its founding, the Center relocated from UCLA to John Jay.
Goff was also a key figure in the founding of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice in 2014 and gave testimony before the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
In 1999, Goff co-founded the Oakland, California-based queer hip hop group Deep Dickollective. During his time as a musician in this group, he was known as Lightskindid Philosopher or LSP.

Research

In 2008, Goff, Margaret Thomas, and Matthew Christian Jackson published findings that white undergraduates incorrectly identified black women by sex more than any other race or gender.