The Kutztown University Criminal Justice Department will host a panel discussion “Police Use of Force: An American Crisis” on Tuesday, Feb. 23 at 6 p.m. in Schaeffer Auditorium. The panel will consist of Mark Talbot, chief, Norristown Police Department; Dennis J. Skayhan, Berks County District Attorney’s Office; Ashley Heiberger, captain, Bethlehem Police Department; and John Dillon, chief, Kutztown University Public Safety and Police Services. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Lindsey Runell, assistant professor of criminal justice, Kutztown University.
The event is free and open to the public. Please be advised that presentations, recordings and videos used during the panel discussion may contain adult language.
Recently there have been a number of communities that have been affected by large scale civil unrest, reactions to perceived and/or actual incidents of police use of excessive force and inappropriate use of lethal force. The riots and demonstrations that followed these incidents were not, however, reactions solely to perceived incorrect decisions by a single police officer. Instead, these incidents acted as sparks to ignite long-standing perceptions of injustice committed by local criminal justice agencies. This panel aims to investigate the circumstances that promote these perceptions of systematic injustice in communities, the specific safety concerns of law enforcement during police-citizen encounters, how the police respond to periods of civil unrest and possible methods to improve police-public relations.
Lindsey Livingston Runell joined the Department of Criminal Justice at Kutztown University in January 2015. Before coming to the university, she taught at Rutgers University and East Stroudsburg University. Dr. Runell received her doctorate degree in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University in May 2015. Prior to that, she was awarded a Juris Doctor from The George Washington University Law School, where her primary areas of focus were criminal law and criminal procedure. Dr. Runell is currently licensed to practice law in New York and New Jersey. She is a co-advisor for the Kutztown University Mock Trial Association and was also appointed to serve as an at-large member of the Kutztown University Commission on the Status of Minorities for the 2015-2016 academic year.