Cambridge police officer Jim Crowley, who is scheduled to be in Washington Thursday to "have a beer" with President Obama and the man he controversially arrested, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, was a star student at a program at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, according to the Wall Street Journal:
In 2007, Crowley attended a three-day program for police officers on racial profiling at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. He so impressed the staff there that he was invited back a year later for an advanced seminar, museum officials say.
Crowley’s attendance at the Jewish civil-rights organization’s programs hasn’t been previously reported, though it is widely known that he taught his own course on the subject at a local police department.
Sunny Lee-Goodman, director of the “Tools for Tolerance” law enforcement program at the Museum of Tolerance, says attendees of the “Perspectives on Profiling” program explore the perils of racial profiling. Using interactive exhibits at the museum, officers study both the Holocaust and the civil-rights movement in America. Officers also engage in soul-searching about their own prejudices.
She says of Crowley: “He stands out to me. He was one of those people who really engaged in sessions, who really showed a high level of understanding of the issue.”
Ironically, Gates is also "prominently featured" at the center’s law enforcement training programs:
At the center’s New York tolerance center, etched on a wall near inspirational words from Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is a quotation from Gates: “There is no tolerance without respect. There is no respect without knowledge.”
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