Claremont McKenna College,
Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum
Wed, October 20, 2021

The debate on policing has generated heated discussions and strong reactions nationwide. Questions like: Are cops detrimental to the welfare of racial minorities? Should we defund them? Or perhaps abolish them? What about police reform? To discuss these and other related questions are Peter Moskos and Alex Vitale, two of the nation’s most prominent experts on policing. A defender of policing, Moskos is a professor at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of Cop in the Hood. A proponent of abolitionism, Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing.The debate will be moderated by Michael Fortner, an associate professor of government at CMC.

Peter Moskos is a professor in the department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. A Princeton undergraduate, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard in sociology. He is the director of John Jay College’s NYPD Executive Master’s Program and  is a former Baltimore City Police Officer. In addition to his primary position at John Jay College, Moskos is a faculty member in CUNY’s doctoral program in sociology, has taught introductory criminal justice classes at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, and is a Senior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project. He is the founder of the Violence Reduction Project.

Alex S. Vitale is professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in The New York TimesThe NationNY Daily News, and USA Today.

This moderated conversation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy and the Dreier Roundtable at CMC.

Registration

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