He’s Academic Director of Urban Studies at CUNY’s Murphy Institute. He is also the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2015), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the New York Academy of History’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History. He is co-editor with Amy Bridges of Urban Citizenship and American Democracy (SUNY Press, 2016).