FACULTY / STAFF NOTES
@ John Jay is published by theDepartment of Institutional Advancement John Jay College of Criminal Justice899 Tenth Avenue,New York, NY 10019 www.jjay.cuny.edu
Editor
Peter Dodenhoff Submissions should be faxed or e-mailed to:Office of Communicationsfax: (212) 237-8642e-mail: pdodenhoff@jjay.cuny.edu
educating for justice
PRESENTING
MIRIAM EHRENBERG
(Psychology) gave aninvited address at the annual conference ofGlobalisation for the Common Good, held inMelbourne, Australia. Her paper, “ApplyingPsychotherapy Techniques to Religious and EthnicConflict,” covered both western and Islamicpsychotherapy approaches and the implicationsof each for conflict resolution.
JEREMY TRAVIS
(President) was the keynotespeaker at the Public Service Conference onthe Future of Community Justice in Wisconsinat Marquette Law School on February 20. Hisremarks focused on “Building Communities withJustice: Overcoming the Tyranny of the Funnel.”
GEORGE ANDREOPOULOS
(Government)delivered a series of lectures on “The Evolutionof International Human Rights Norms” at theUniversity of Bologna in January. The lectureswere part of the university’s graduate program inhuman rights and humanitarian intervention.
PETER MOSKOS
(Law, Police Science andCriminal Justice Administration) was a panelistat the New York Academy of Medicine’s “HarmReduction” conference on January 23. He wasalso a featured speaker at the annual conferenceof Students for Sensible Drug Policy, held inCollege Park, MD, on November 23.
R. TERRY FURST
(Anthropology) presented“A Qualitative Exploration of Suboxone OpioidMaintenance in a Harm Reduction Setting inNew York City,” a paper cowritten with HermanJoseph, and Sharon Stancliff, at the ColumbiaUniversity Seminar Series in New York in Decem-ber. Furst was also one of the authors, alongwith Stancliff and Joseph, of “Low ThresholdBuprenorphine,” a paper presented by Stancliffat the 7th National Harm Reduction Conferencein Miami last November.
BETWEEN THE COVERS
PATRICK COLLINS
(Communication & TheatreArts) had two books released in January bySterling Publishers, a Barnes and Noble imprint.
Negotiate to Win!
is a tactical guide to achievingsuccess in negotiations, and features a uniquechapter on cross-cultural negotiation. Thesecond book,
Speak with Power and Confidence
,is an updated and revised edition of Collins’comprehensive guide to maximizing publicspeaking skills, originally published in 1998.Both works attracted the attention of foreignpublishers at the Fall 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair.
JOSEPH KING
(Law, Police Science and CriminalJustice Administration) published his article“Policing after Peel: the Government Moves toCentralize” in the
Turkish Journal of Police Stud-ies
in 2008. His article “Police Problems: LaborRelations in the Early Police Service of the UnitedKingdom” appeared in the January 2009 issue of
Police Forum
, published by the Police Section ofthe Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.As the saying goes, it’s not what you say, buthow you say it. According to forensic linguisticsexperts, however, it may be both.An all-day workshop on February 20, co-sponsored by the Center for Modern ForensicPractice and the Department of English, broughttogether two of the top experts in the field todiscuss “Forensic Linguistics for InvestigativePractitioners,” with a focus on threat assessment,counterterrorism and criminal communications.The workshop was conducted in a split-session format by Robert Leonard, head of theHofstra University Department of Linguisticsand director of the Hofstra Forensic LinguisticProject, and James R. Fitzgerald, a former FBIsupervisory special agent who is now a violentcrime consultant and a forensic linguist with theAcademy Group Inc.Fitzgerald, a member of the FBI’s Unabom taskforce, described the investigation that ultimatelyled to the arrest and conviction of TheodoreKaczynski in 1996 as the “largest authorialattribution project ever undertaken by the FBI.”The task force, which at its peak consideredroughly 2,500 suspects in the serial bombinginvestigation, pored over the 35,000-wordThe legacy of Lloyd Sealy — pioneering policecommander and educator — lived on at theannual lecture event named for the late JohnJay professor, in a lively discussion of how policeleaders can use research to reduce racial bias.The event, co-sponsored by John Jay and theNational Organization of Black Law EnforcementExecutives (NOBLE), featured Dr. Tracie Keesee,the Division Chief of Research, Training andTechnology for the Denver Police Department,and Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, a social psychologist atthe University of California, Los Angeles. The twohave been exploring how research and trainingcan be applied together to address possible racialbias in police decision-making.“As police officers, especially black officers,we struggle to do the right thing, and to do rightby the community,” said Keesee, a 20-year policeveteran. To that end, the Denver PD conductedextensive research to determine the extent towhich racial bias and stereotyped beliefs mayinfluence officers’ handling of certain situations,such as the decision to stop, arrest or usephysical force.“We brought in world-class scientists to askpointed questions,” said Keesee. “After all, wein law enforcement often think we know all theanswers.” The department created a partnershiparrangement with university-based researchers,giving them wide access to information andpromising them autonomy in terms of publishingtheir findings.Using a high-tech virtual reality simulator,officers were measured for their reactions to andhandling of various threatening situations. Ingeneral, racial bias was found to affect officers’reaction time, but not the decision to shoot thesuspect. The department created a feedbackloop consisting of officers’ behavior, trainingevaluations and psychological testing, Keeseesaid, and researchers were able to conclude that“training does what it’s supposed to do.”Goff followed Keesee to the podium andnoted that as an outgrowth of the Denverresearch, a Consortium for Police Leadership inEquity was established, consisting of 15 policedepartments nationwide and researchers fromJohn Jay, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and UCLA.“The challenge for researchers is how do wetranslate findings from the lab to the street,” hesaid.“Like Lloyd Sealy, we believe education is apowerful weapon for civil rights,” Goff added.Sealy was one of 60 founding members ofNOBLE in 1976. His 34-year career with the NewYork City Police Department saw him become thedepartment’s first black precinct commander, andretire at the rank of assistant chief inspector.
ALISSE WATERSTON
(Anthropology) hashad two new edited volumes published:
An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline
(Berghahn Books, 2009) and
Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing
(WileyBlackwell, 2009, Maria D. Vesperi, co-editor).
An Anthropology of War
includes Waterston’sintroduction, “On War and Accountability.”
Anthropology off the Shelf
includes a chapterby Waterston titled “Writing Poverty, Draw-ing Readers: Stories in Love, Sorrow andRage.” Waterston serves as chair of the AmericanAnthropological Association’s Committee onthe Future of Print and Electronic Publishing toguide the digital transition of scholarly publish-ing. In November, Waterston presented a talk atthe association’s annual meeting on “The Acad-emy, the Market-State and the Dissemination ofAnthropological Knowledge in the Digital Age.”
PETER MOSKOS
(Law, Police Science andCriminal Justice Administration) had his bookreview of Hugh Holton’s
The Thin Black Line:True Stories by Black Law Enforcement OfficersPolicing America’s Meanest Streets
published in
The Washington Post
on January 11.manifesto written by Kaczynski in search of clues.One of the phenomena spotted in the document,as in numerous similar communications, waswhat Fitzgerald called “contraindicators,” orwords and phrases that actually mean theopposite of what they appear to suggest.“What kind of person wrote this?” Fitzgeraldsaid, noting that 95 percent of threat lettershandled by the FBI are anonymous, and thewriters usually put as much effort into the threatas they do into maintaining their anonymity.Other tip offs spotted by investigatorsinclude whether an individual writes out datesnumerically with hyphens — as in 9-11-01— slashes — 9/11/01 — or periods — 9.11.01.The postmarks and return addresses on threatletters may also be contraindicators, Fitzgeraldsaid, in an attempt to confuse investigators. Suchwas the case with the 2001 Americathrax case,in which anthrax poison was mailed to a numberof different targets.Fitzgerald and Leonard first met during thecourse of the Americathrax investigation that lednearly seven years later to the FBI’s identificationof chemist Bruce T. Ivins as the most likelysuspect.
Like Sealy, Researchers at Annual Lecture See Educationas a Weapon for Civil Rights
Reducing Racial Bias by Police Is the Goal
Speech Sleuths Analyze Art &Science of Forensic Linguistics
Tracie Keesee, a division chief with the Denver Police Department, explores the use of research to reduce police bias, whileco-researcher Phillp Atiba Goff awaits his turn at the microphone during the annual Lloyd Sealy Lecture. (See story at left.)
On the Margins
Alford Young Jr., a sociologist at the University of Michigan and author of
The Minds of Mar-ginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility. Opportunity and Future Life Chances
, interactswith the audience that packed the Gerald W. Lynch Theater Lobby during a February 23 discus- sion and book-signing event co-sponsored by Center on Race, Crime and Justice.
Darkest Night
Performers from the Ruth Kanner Theatre Group at Tel Aviv University stage a scene from
Cases of Murder (November9, 1938: A protocol of fear brutality and death)
duringa special presentation at John Jay on February 27. Thetheatrical work reconstructs acts of violence committed against Jews during the night between November 9 and 10, 1938, known as Krystallnacht. Using a montage of documentary and literary devices, the scenes from
Cases ofMurder
exposed the mechanisms of moral evasion, vagueand ambiguous talk and turning blind eyes that madethe atrocities possible. “It was significant that this work occurred at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The larger discourse on genocide, war crimes, human rights abusesand the struggle for social justice is clearly served by events such as this,” said Professor Seth Baumrin, who facilitated the event for the Department of Communication and The-atre Arts. The presentation also included readings of new work on the investigation of war crimes, enacted by John Jay Professor Ric Curtis and student Luis Guitierrez, and adiscussion led by Professor Itai Sneh.
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