Faculty teach cultural awareness to state troopers
Archived article from Dec 15, 2003
By Mike Sutton
The Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience is teaching classes this fall in cultural awareness to all 2,700 of New Jersey’s state troopers.
The New Jersey attorney general’s office entered into a contract with the institute to create the classes in an effort to encourage both professional and personal growth among members of the New Jersey State Police. The sessions arise from a consent decree issued by a New Jersey district judge in December 1999.
The decree was the settlement of a lawsuit alleging racial profiling brought against the state police, the State of New Jersey and the N.J. Department of Law and Public Safety by then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. The classes are scheduled to continue for at least two more years under the consent decree.
This is the first time in the three-year-old program in cultural education that a single university has been given sole responsibility for teaching all the cultural-awareness courses to the entire force. Rutgers–Newark faculty and administrators are providing the training under the supervision of Clement Price, institute director and a Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor. Price developed the curriculum with his staff.
“The professors from Rutgers–Newark are providing a large and rich humanities context for the troopers – not simply Diversity 101 or Good Policing 101,” Price said. “This is an example of public intellectual work that really matters to our community.”
The faculty and administrators teaching the program come from a wide variety of disciplines and include Associate Provost Marcia Brown; Charles Russell, associate professor of English; Tim Coogan, lecturer in history; Brian Ferguson, professor of anthropology; Max Herman, assistant professor of sociology; and Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers– Newark’s Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies.
Each trooper will attend a one-day, eight-hour course taught by a team. The classes began Oct. 20 and will continue through Dec. 19. About 30 troopers per session will receive the cultural awareness training from Price and his colleagues, while other troopers will simultaneously get ethical training from the state police’s own Office of Professional Standards, according to Capt. Alfred Peters, commandant of the New Jersey State Police Training Bureau.
“I see it as a huge advantage for our state police,” Peters said. “It’s leading to more open communication, which is essential for all of us.”
N.J. Attorney General Peter Harvey strongly supports the training. “The richness of our world, and indeed, New Jersey, results from different people, different cultures and different experiences,” he said. “The enlightened among us see difference as an opportunity to learn and grow beyond the narrow confines of our own self-imposed limits or acquired prejudgments.”
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