“I will not shrug my shoulders in the face of injustice.”
KENNETH PAUL THOMPSON ’92 grew up in the Wagner Houses in East Harlem and then Co-Op City in the Bronx. He was inspired to pursue law enforcement by his mother Clara Thompson, one of the first women ever to patrol the streets of New York City as a police officer. After graduating magna cum laude from the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Ken attended New York University School of Law, where he was a recipient of the Law School’s Arthur T. Vanderbilt Medal for his outstanding contributions to the law school community. Years later, the Law School’s Law Alumni of Color Association awarded Ken its Distinguished Service Award, for his outstanding work, then, as a formidable federal prosecutor and leading civil rights attorney.
At the Law School, Ken was active in the Black Allied Law Students Association and a protégé of then-Professor Ronald Noble, who had been a deputy assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice. Influenced by Professor Noble’s career path, Ken worked as his special assistant after Noble became assistant secretary of the US Treasury, and he was part of the team that investigated the 1993 federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Ken was subsequently an assistant US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where his most high-profile win was the successful prosecution of Justin Volpe, one of the New York City police officers who beat and tortured Haitian immigrant Abner Louima.
Ken then spent 14 years in private practice, establishing one of New York’s premier civil rights law firms. Among his many high-profile, high-impact cases, Ken stood up for hotel maids like Nafissatou Diallo in the aftermath of a violent sexual assault and exposed the racially discriminatory practice of shopping-while-black at one of the nation's largest department stores. In short, Ken had great compassion for the downtrodden, provided a voice for the voiceless and struck fear in the hearts of institutional bullies.
In November 2013, Ken won the Brooklyn district attorney’s race against a longtime incumbent, becoming the first African American to lead the nation’s third-largest prosecutor’s office. Along with bolstering resources for preventing and investigating crimes, including a multipronged approach to combating gun violence and the establishment of a dedicated forensic science unit, Ken sought to eliminate practices that undermined both law enforcement and community relations with police. Within weeks of his inauguration, Ken informed the New York City Police Department that his office would largely cease prosecutions of low-level marijuana possession, the NYPD adopted his approach—as did prosecutors throughout the country. Perhaps most notable, Ken launched Brooklyn’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU) to investigate suspected wrongful convictions. In just a few short years, Brooklyn’s CRU has exonerated 24 people and become the national model.