Jeremiah Goulka has worked at the intersection of public safety, security, criminal justice, and public health for two decades. He is currently senior fellow in the Action Lab at Northeastern University School of Law, where he is creating a new initiative tentatively called Climate and Public Safety (CAPS).
CAPS seeks to address the numerous ways the climate and environmental crises intersect and harm public safety, public health, equity, and the health and safety of criminal justice personnel and the people they incarcerate. CAPS has conducted preliminary mapping of these intersections (link), is building a research bank, is seeking opportunities for research, convening, and activating the criminal justice system to take action.
Jeremiah is also the executive director of the SHIELD Training Initiative (link), based at Northeastern. SHIELD is an innovative, evidence-based program designed to improve the occupational safety and health of police, first responders, and criminal justice personnel while also improving the outcomes of people with addiction whom they encounter.
Prior to joining the Action Lab and SHIELD, Jeremiah was an analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he was a core member of the RAND Center for Quality Policing. He conducted research on criminal justice, diversity, and national security. He led studies on issues ranging from anti-gang initiatives to DNA databasing to an Iranian cult group.
After Hurricane Katrina, Jeremiah was co-founder and de facto chief of staff of the Southeast Louisiana Criminal Justice Recovery Task Force, a joint local-state-federal effort to rebuild and reform the metropolitan New Orleans criminal justice system in the wake of the storm. This experience laid the early seeds of CAPS.
Jeremiah was an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, hired in the Attorney General’s Honors Graduate Program. He worked in the Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch, representing the United States in constitutional, foreign affairs, and administrative litigation in federal and state courts. After graduating from law school, he was a law clerk for Judge W. Eugene Davis on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Lafayette, Louisiana.
He has been as a Professor of Policy Analysis in the Pardee RAND Graduate School, a Visiting Fellow at the Northwestern University School of Law Center for International Human Rights, and a Tutor in American History at the University of Edinburgh. He also published a history book a while back.
Jeremiah received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, an LL.B. from the University of Edinburgh Law School, and his A.B. in History from Bowdoin College. He spent his junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris.
An avid traveler, he has been to all fifty states and all six populated continents. He is also singer-songwriter in the acoustic kindie rock trio King Bullfrog, which performs several times per month around Washington, DC. Their first album, Lions & Lilypads, was produced by the Grammy-winning Dean Jones in his straw bale No-Parking Studio in the Hudson Valley, NY.
Jeremiah is a fellow of the British American Project, and a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the American Society of Adaptation Practitioners, and several communities of practice related to climate and public safety. He lives with his wife and children on Capitol Hill.
