Felician University Event: “Community Policing in Rutherford”

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FIRST CALL: “Community Policing in Rutherford,” a conversation about town/county/university relations and related issues, with John Russo, Chief of the Rutherford Police Department, and Gurbir Grewal, Bergen County Prosecutor.

The event is the third in the University’s series on Race and Criminal Justice in America, and takes place Wednesday, November 30, @1-2 pm, Castle View Room, Felician University Rutherford campus (227 Montross Ave, Rutherford, NJ, 07070). All are welcome. Free registration required at the door.

Sponsored by the Felician University Committee for Leadership & Social Justice, the Department of Criminal Justice, the Pre-Law Program, and the Felician UN Fellows Program.

Prior events in the series:

September 27: “Racial Profiling in Bloomfield? A Discussion,” with Professor Mark Denbeaux, Seton Hall University Law School.

November 10: “Police Stops: What Are Your Rights? What Should You Do?” with Maria Lopez-Delgado (New Jersey Office of the Public Defender) and John E. Link (adjunct professor of Criminal Justice, Felician University; former Chief of Police, Clifton, New Jersey).

7 thoughts on “Felician University Event: “Community Policing in Rutherford””

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  3. A comment on the event that I wrote on FB:

    Here’s an interview in the Bergen Record with Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir Grewal. It isn’t coverage of the Felician event per se, but it covers some of the same ground.

    I think it’s regrettable that neither the Record nor anyone at the Felician event (including myself) thought to ask Grewal about his position on Bill Brennan’s citizen-initiated criminal case against Governor Chris Christie. Not that we didn’t ask Grewal some contentious questions, but no one mentioned the Brennan-Christie case, and no one mentioned the Wyckoff racial profiling case, either. (The prosecutor was the one to bring the latter topic up with me during a private conversation after the event.)

    It became sadly apparent during the Q&A that the Felician audience was insufficiently informed about local politics to raise some of the questions that really mattered. I include myself in this assessment, despite having asked four questions in the Q&A, some of which struck some audience members as “Khawaja’s interrogating the prosecutor.”

    As an educator, I’d be remiss in functioning as a cheerleader for the event while failing to mention the fact that not one Felician student so much as asked a question during the Q&A. That’s both our failure as educators and theirs as citizens. Incidentally, the local news in north Jersey is currently riveted on a three-point basket scored from half-court by a Felician basketball player during the last seconds of a recent game here. Evidently what matters to people is that our students can make three-pointers from half-court in a basketball game; it doesn’t matter that they can’t make a cogent point in the court of public opinion.

    That said, it’s hard to imagine that the Record is uninformed; they just decided not to ask the relevant questions, despite having had the opportunity to do so.

    We all owed Brennan that much–a question to the prosecutor about the disposition of the case against Christie–and we failed him.

    It’s an open question how long this country can survive on an uninformed citizenry and a docile journalistic corps. But for the foreseeable future, that’s what it has. Good luck dealing with our rulers-elect.

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