This is just the beginning of Gov. Chris Christie’s Muslim outreach committee. The goal is to force Islamic training on local and county cops as well.
If a police officer pulls over a female
driver wearing a veil covering all but her eyes, can he demand that she
lift the veil so he can identify her?
Before a classroom of state police
recruits, Mohammad Ali Chaudry, a Muslim scholar, explained that there’s
no religious reason for her to refuse. She has to obey the laws of her
country “for everybody’s security,” he said.
Questions about the veil and other facets
of Islamic faith and culture are at the heart of the one-hour class, now
a requirement for every New Jersey state trooper, that emerged from
anxiety and acrimony following news last year that New York City
detectives were spying on New Jersey Muslims.
But is one hour of teaching, out of a
solid week of police training, enough to markedly improve relations
between police officers and wary Muslim communities across the state?
Chaudry, president of the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge and a Rutgers professor, said it’s a start.
That makes Chaudry the president of the Mosque continues its zoning jihad on residents of a New Jersey neighborhood.
One result of strong backlash to spying by
the New York Police Department was the creation of the Muslim Outreach
Committee, a group of about 20 Muslim leaders and top law-enforcement
officials that began meeting a year ago. The training, which is included
in classwork this week at the state criminal justice academy in Sea
Girt, is one of several committee efforts aimed at building trust.
“When we first started, there was anger
and hostility,” said Imam Mustafa El-Amin, who heads the Masjid Ibrahim
mosque in Newark. “Now it has actually developed to achievements and
goals as opposed to just talking and airing out who’s guilty and who’s
not.”
Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman said the training is helping to bridge the divide.
“We don’t agree all the time on every
issue, but we do agree we’ll talk about them, and that has gotten us
miles ahead in the process,” he said.
New
state police recruits are attending the class through Oct. 11. Other
recruits and veteran troopers will get the training by video as part of
regular in-service training.
In a recent class, a few officers stared at their cellphones while Chaudry was lecturing. Questions were encouraged, but only two out of about 120 people in the class asked any.
Chaudry said it was a challenge to cover
Islam in an hour and have time for questions. In his Rutgers class, he
devotes 90 minutes just to talk about the term jihad, he said.
“It’s not going to change everybody’s view, and it’s going to take a lot more than a one-hour lecture, but at least it’s a beginning,” he said.
The class was meant to be an overview to
assist the police in understanding basic concepts, customs and wardrobe,
said Paul Loriquet, director of communications in the Attorney
General’s Office. He said the state police and the outreach committee
will determine, based on feedback, if they need to have more focused
training. Read more »
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