Long before police brutality emerged as a dominant public issue in the United States, Cynthia Lee, a George Washington University professor and an expert on race and self-defense, devoted much of her research to deadly police shootings of unarmed Black men and women.
In a 2004 study, she concluded that stereotypes about African Americans, often working at a subconscious level, influenced a police officer's split-second decision about whether to use deadly force, accounting for the disproportionately large number of Black victims in police shootings.
In 2018, she authored a groundbreaking law
