The Graduate Studies Office in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities is pleased to announce the first event in the Tea of Tuesday lecture series. Please join Professor Rod Brunson on Tuesday, September 15 from 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. for "Hugging the Block: Improving Public Safety and Police-Community Relations" lecture and discussion. 

There are dimensions of urban policing, requiring honest and thoughtful public discourse beyond simplistic explanations commonly used to dismiss police wrongdoing.  Aggressive policing strategies have contributed to volatile neighborhood environments, profoundly unraveling citizen trust and exacerbating unfairness in the criminal justice system.  Objective examinations of contemporary policing are becoming increasingly polarized, unjustly characterizing meaningful critiques of misguided crime-control strategies as unpatriotic and anti-law enforcement.  Given this backdrop, Dr. Brunson offers a nuanced analysis of Black citizen-police experiences, one that humanizes both parties – a dimension sorely missing from most current discussions of tenuous police-minority citizen relations.

Rod K. Brunson is the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., Professor of Public Life in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University. He is also the Director of Graduate Mentoring and Diversity Initiatives in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and has produced a steady stream of research informing criminal justice policy and crime control practices. Brunson’s scholarship appears in the British Journal of Criminology, Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, City & Community, Evaluation Review, Urban Affairs Review, and the Journal of Research, Crime and Delinquency.