The Defender Association

Metropolitan police forces increasingly use trespass laws to exclude "undesirable" individuals from large swaths of urban space. These policing practices, used largely against people of color and the homeless, threaten the meaning of citizenship and community in American cities. Often, individuals are banned from zones where they or their families reside, or where they need to go to access social services or public transportation. Moreover, each time a banned individual enters a space from which he or she has been excluded, he or she is subject to arrest, conviction, and incarceration. 

Through research and advocacy, Anita Khandelwal will challenge the Seattle Police Department's reliance on this dubious application of local trespass laws, and provide a model for challenging these practices nationally.

Khandelwal is currently a staff attorney at The Defender Association in Seattle.  She received her JD from Yale Law School in 2005.  While in law school, she was co-chair of collective of Women of Color, a founder and chair of the Yale Law Women Activism Committee, and participated in the Workers' Rights Project.   She also interned at the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, the ACLU Reproductive Rights Project, and the Economic Justice Project at the Brennan Center.  Khandelwal was a Relman Civil Rights Fellow and clerked in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge William Wayne Justice in the Western District of Texas.  She graduated cum laude in anthropology and History from Yale University in 1998 and received her MA in anthropology in 2002 from Columbia University.

Seattle, WA