Cynthia Conti-Cook
Biography
Cynthia Conti-Cook is an expert on issues at the intersection of technology and fights for justice.
A civil rights litigator, public defender and strategist who has fought at the forefront of campaigns against police secrecy (Repeal50-A in NYS), Cynthia has led class and individual civil rights federal and state actions, bringing impact litigation on a range of policy matters. She pioneered CAPstat, a first-of-its-kind public database that tracks misconduct by New York City police officers, providing a critical means of transparency to an issue that has historically been shrouded in secrecy. Her work on CAPstat has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and El Diario, and is being replicated by other public defender offices across the country.
She is currently a Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation in the Gender, Race, and Ethnic Justice thematic area, and before that led several strategic litigation projects at the Legal Aid Society of New York City's Special Litigation Unit. Cynthia has led dozens of trainings and presentations to hundreds of attorneys nationwide and has spoken at multiple international conferences about the impact of technology on criminal legal systems. Her work at Ford also includes supporting the mass incarceration team’s efforts to help the field leverage technology to advance police accountability, and to help the team better understand and respond to algorithmic bias in bail, sentencing, and parole considerations.
Cynthia has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, and interviewed by Michael Moore to share her findings from her article, ‘Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary’, on tech threats to abortion access in a post-Roe era, published in 2020. Her work has earned several awards including the 2019 Legal Rebel award from the American Bar Association.
