News & Commentary written by Jenn Rolnick Borchetta

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta (she/her) is deputy project director in the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project, focusing on policing litigation and integrated advocacy. In this position, Jenn develops and leads legal strategies to challenge police abuse, strengthen individual rights and liberties against police authority, and advance a paradigm of public safety where policing is minimal and all communities are safe, free, and equal.

Jenn has extensive experience litigating police misconduct and obtaining sweeping policy changes. She has worked closely with grassroots organizers and people impacted by police abuse to support broader social justice movements. She served as a senior attorney in the trial and remedial process of Floyd v. City of New York, which established that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice was unconstitutional. She later worked with organizers and lawyers in that case to spearhead a city-wide community process for designing stop-and-frisk reforms. Some of her other notable victories in the policing context include: securing a court order requiring the NYPD to remove sealed arrest information from more than a dozen surveillance databases and predictive policing technologies; providing legal research and advice to organizers on the ground in Ferguson after the St. Louis prosecutor’s non-indictment of the officer who killed Michael Brown, to support and protect protesters; obtaining over one million dollars in pre-litigation settlement offers for two dozen people brutalized by the NYPD during protests in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.

Immediately prior to coming the ACLU, Jenn was the Managing Director of Impact Litigation at The Bronx Defenders, where she developed and managed a civil rights practice that brought lawsuits challenging widespread injustices on behalf of those ensnared in the criminal, family, immigration, and housing court systems. She is a graduate of Boston University School of Law and Rutgers College, and she is the 2019 recipient of Boston University’s Silver Single Award for significant contributions to the community.