Phillip Atiba Goff

Phillip Atiba Goff is an American psychologist known for researching the relationship between race and policing in the United States. He was appointed the inaugural Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2016, the college's first endowed professorship. In 2020, he became a Professor of African-American Studies and Psychology at Yale University.

Goff is the Co-founder and CEO of the research center/action organization Center for Policing Equity, which conducts research with the aim of ensuring accountable and racially unbiased policing in the United States. CPE is the host of a National Science Foundation-funded effort to collect national data on police behavior, specifically stops and use of force, called the National Justice Database. The analytic framework Goff developed as part of the NJD has been called a potential model for police data accountability nationally. In 2016, a decade after its founding, the Center relocated from UCLA to John Jay. In 2020, the Center relocated from John Jay to Yale.

Goff was also a key figure in the founding of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice in 2014 and gave testimony before the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

In 2008, Goff, Margaret Thomas, and Matthew Christian Jackson published findings that white undergraduates incorrectly identified black women by sex more than any other race or gender.

Goff has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and an associate professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He taught at Pennsylvania State University between 2004-2005.

Goff grew up in Philadelphia. He earned an AB from Harvard University in 1999 in Afro-American studies. He received an MA in 2001 in Social Psychology and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 2005.

In 1999, Goff co-founded the Oakland, California-based queer hip hop group Deep Dickollective. During his time as a musician in this group, he was known as "Lightskindid Philosopher" or LSP.