Regina Holloway
Vice President of Global Strategic Community Impact, Axon
“I believe that in order to reach a world free of racial inequity and discrimination, laws and policies must be activated to dismantle structural racism.”
I am a Black woman, a mother of four children, a lifelong learner and a survivor of physical and sexual abuse. These characteristics in many ways define me and are the foundation for my passion: advancing racial equity and social justice. I grew up in West Philadelphia in the 1980s in a community ravaged by the crack cocaine epidemic. I witnessed countless friends, children, die in the war for resources. They were workers in the only viable economy in our community, the drug trade.
I had my first child at 18, started law school alone with four children in the same year my husband went to prison and graduated with the hope of working to share my newly gained privilege as an attorney. My first job out of law school was as a clinical fellow in the Housing Discrimination Testing Program at Suffolk University Law School, where I investigated claims of discrimination and designed systemic and complaint-based housing discrimination tests. I oversaw the testing related to research in our program’s Gender Identity Study, which was published in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. I went on to work as a bar advocate in the Boston District Courts, representing indigent clients. Thereafter I took a position with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in Chicago, supervising a major case squad that investigated high-profile, officer-involved shootings.
After seeing much despair and little justice, I was fortunate enough to join the Policing Project at New York University Law School. The Policing Project is dedicated to bringing democratic accountability to policing. My work involves helping to advance the voice of community in determining how it is policed. The community all too often are people of color, poor and forgotten.