Police Review Panel

Theron Bowman began his public service career in 1983 as an officer with the Arlington Police Department and served in numerous positions before being appointed police chief in 1999. He later served five years as a deputy city manager and director of public safety in Arlington before retiring in 2017. He is a police practices expert and president/CEO of The Bowman Group.

Bowman led the North Texas regional public safety efforts for the 2010 NBA All Star game, MLB World Series games and NFL Super Bowl XLV. He created and led an internal workgroup that explored and later created a statistically significant predictive geospatial algorithm that accurately explained more than 70% of residential burglaries in a city of 370,000 people.

He is a federal court-appointed consent decree deputy monitor in Baltimore and a multidisciplinary law enforcement expert on the New Orleans and Memphis monitoring teams. 

Alex del Carmen received a Ph.D. in criminology from the College of Criminology at Florida State University. He is considered an authority on race and crime, with particular emphasis on racial profiling in law enforcement.

Del Carmen has written numerous articles in internationally recognized journals and published several books, including the nationally recognized "Racial Profiling in America."

He has presented his research findings across the world. Over the past 20-plus years, del Carmen has trained thousands of police officers, including Texas police chiefs. In addition, he created the Texas racial profiling statistical template widely used by law enforcement agencies throughout the state. He is often a guest on CNN, Fox News Radio, Telemundo, Univision and NBC, among other media outlets.

Del Carmen has served as a federal monitor for two of the most significant police reform cases in the nation. He has lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for over 20 years and consults on racial profiling and bias-based policing with police agencies throughout the country.

Lynda Garcia is the policing campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund. In this role, she oversees the "New Era of Public Safety" initiative to promote fair, safe and effective policing through collaborative reform.

Before joining the Leadership Conference, Garcia served as a trial attorney in the Special Litigation Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, where she conducted pattern-or-practice investigations of law enforcement agencies and enforced consent decrees to ensure constitutional, bias-free policing. Previously, Garcia worked at the ACLU national office and the ACLU of New Jersey challenging discriminatory police practices in communities of color.

In her role as a civil rights attorney and policing expert, Garcia has worked collaboratively with communities and police officials across the country. She has testified before Congress on best practices in policing and for congressional briefings to promote a new era of public safety and advance 21st century best practices in policing. Garcia is co-author of "The War on Marijuana in Black and White," a national study documenting racial disparities in marijuana arrests.

Garcia graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College and cum laude from Fordham Law School. After law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge John Gleeson in the Eastern District of New York.

Emily Gunston has been deputy legal director at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs since August 2018. She directs and supervises all of the committee’s criminal legal system reform work. She is responsible for significant cases and matters related to police accountability, prison conditions, parole and compassionate release, and the criminalization of poverty. Her work in this area includes individual and class action litigation, as well as policy, regulatory and legislative initiatives to mitigate the harshest conditions of confinement and reduce unnecessary and discriminatory contact with the criminal system and its effects.

Previously, Gunston was a deputy chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she helped lead the division’s group conducting pattern-or-practice investigations of police departments. She led the investigation of the Chicago Police Department and played leadership roles in the investigation of and work to reform other police agencies, including the New Orleans Police Department and the Cleveland Division of Police.

Gunston was a public defender in Contra Costa County, Calif., from 2001-2009. She received her JD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001 and a bachelor’s of arts degree from University of Maryland, College Park.

Tom Petrowski is a consultant, practicing attorney and visiting assistant professor in the School of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Strategic Studies at Tarleton State University. He is currently assistant special master to the U.S. District Court in Puerto Rico, supporting the U.S. Department of Justice consent decree against the Puerto Rican Police Department.

In 2018, Petrowski retired from the FBI after 23 years of diverse service. He spent about half of his career in the FBI Legal Program. He was assigned to the Legal Instruction Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where he was the primary use-of-force legal instructor and taught law to new agent trainees, FBI employees attending in-service training and state and local law enforcement managers and officers attending the National Academy and other specialized legal instruction.

He then spent three years as the associate division counsel before returning to operational management. At the time of his retirement, he had served as the chief division counsel in the Dallas FBI Field Office for approximately five years.

Petrowski started his government service as a U.S. Army officer and served exclusively in Special Forces, initially as a Special Forces operator and later as a JAG officer assigned to Special Forces. He deployed to Africa, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, Central America and Haiti. After leaving active duty and before entering the FBI, he practiced corporate law in Boston and taught at Northeastern University.

Jonathan M. Smith was appointed executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs on July 1, 2016. The committee has an extensive docket of individual and class action litigation that address racial and economic injustice in the criminal legal system, education, employment, housing and public accommodations. Committee staff also work on policy, regulatory and legislative initiatives to strengthen civil rights protections.

Smith served as chief of the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2010-2015. During his tenure, the section was responsible for 18 pattern-or-practice investigations of civil rights violations by law enforcement, including the civil investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting and the investigation of gender bias in the handling of sexual assaults by the University of Montana, the Missoula, Montana, Police Department and the Missoula, Montana, County Attorney. 

Smith has an extensive career in civil legal services before his government services. He was the executive director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, the Public Justice Center in Baltimore and the D.C. Prisoners’ Legal Services Project. He started his career as an associate to Virginia civil rights lawyer Victor Glasberg.

Smith serves on the District of Columbia Access to Justice Commission. He is also a member of the American Law Institute.

Marcia K. Thompson has practiced law, been a professor and a law enforcement practitioner with more than 20 years’ experience working in the field. She is currently vice president at Hillard Heintze in the law enforcement consulting division, providing oversight, management and technical assistance on various law enforcement assessments, trainings and reviews.

Thompson has served as a law enforcement administrator and part of the command leadership team and oversaw professional standards, accreditation, compliance, training, records management, recruitment, field training, in-service training, leadership development, succession planning, community engagement, youth outreach and the community advisory committee.

She has served as an adviser to several organizations on civil rights and law enforcement issues for more than 15 years. As a member of both IACP and NOBLE, she has provided insight and guidance on timely and novel civil and human rights matters impacting law enforcement nationally. In various capacities, she has provided a policy, training and legal perspective with a civil rights lens on law enforcement, community policing and criminal justice matters.

Thompson served as an ombudsman for a federal agency handling agency-wide concerns and trends as a neutral regarding policy, practices and procedures. She has conducted large, facilitated dialogues with communities on police and other related public services in cities that include Washington D.C., New Orleans, Chicago and Baltimore.

Rita J. Villarreal-Watkins is executive director of the Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas. Before her appointment in 2001, she was project manager for LEMIT's Leadership Command College.

As executive director of LEMIT, Villareal-Watkins’ responsibilities include administrative supervision of the institute’s programs and curriculum development. Her proficiency includes cultural diversity, implicit bias and de-escalation training. She also oversees curriculum development, human resource management and supervision, fiscal planning and strategic planning. Villarreal-Watkins has also developed a specialization in trauma response to crisis as a licensed professional counselor.

Villareal-Watkins worked in the criminal justice field for 17 years before joining the LEMIT staff. While she began her career as a juvenile probation officer, her move into policing came in 1984 with the College Station Police Department, and finally as chief deputy for the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office. She is instructor-certified by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education, as well as an alternative dispute resolution mediator. In 1996, she graduated from the Leadership Command College, and in 1995, the 182nd FBI National Academy, where she was selected section representative of the academy class.

Her academic background includes a bachelor’s of science degree in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University, a master of public administration degree from Texas A&M University, a master of counseling degree and a doctorate in educational leadership and counseling from Sam Houston State University.