The Miller Center engages in education and public service focused on protecting vulnerable communities. The Eagleton affiliated center identifies and disseminates best practices, offers training workshops, consults on security and civil liberties, and undertakes research.
The mission of the Miller Center is to assist vulnerable communities, particularly communities of faith, to enhance their safety and their standing in society by improving their relationships with law enforcement, with other government agencies, and with other vulnerable communities.
The Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience engages in education and public service focused on protecting vulnerable populations to enhance their safety and standing in society by improving their relationships with law enforcement, with other government agencies, and with other vulnerable communities. The Eagleton affiliated Center identifies and disseminates best practices, offers training workshops, consults on security and civil liberties, and undertakes research.
The Center’s policing initiatives integrate research and evidence-based best practices into police operations, violence reduction, problem-solving, community policing, education, training, and the development of criminal justice policy and practice. These efforts and findings directly help public safety professionals/agencies and community organizations more effectively protect and serve their communities.
Composed of individuals with a broad range of experience in the public safety arena, the Miller Center is a product of the combined efforts of the former Center on Policing and former Miller Center on Community Protection and Resilience. In November 2022, senior university officials announced a $2 million gift and creation of an endowed fund from Rutgers alumnus Paul Miller and his family to allow the Center on Policing (formerly known as the Police Institute, founded by Dr. George Kelling in 2001) to join the Miller Center on Community Protection and Resilience. The newly combined center is known as the Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience (“Miller Center”) and the joint effort will allow better coordination of research and real-world work to have an even greater impact in improving relations between police and communities and in promoting the well-being of vulnerable populations in New Jersey, the United States, and beyond.
The need to establish a center dedicated to the protection of vulnerable populations is a direct outgrowth of Rutgers’ work several years ago on the Faith-Based Communities Security Program. That program, which was launched in May 2014 in the wake of a lethal terrorist attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, was founded in recognition of a rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe and America and of intolerance generally. The reality that almost a billion people now live in countries where they were not born, coupled with the continued struggles of historic minority populations, mean that we live as never before in a world of vulnerable populations. Events since the inception of the program – terrorist attacks in public settings such as stadiums, cafes, subway stations and airports, desecration of religiously affiliated buildings, schools and homes, and mass killings in churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues — have, if anything, served to underscore both the vulnerabilities of certain populations and the growing levels of violence – verging, in some cases, on outright genocide — directed at them.
The Miller Center will continue work in promoting the resilience of vulnerable populations, identifying and implementing best practices in policing, and researching and calling attention to extremism and hate speech as they spread across social media platforms and erupt in real-world acts of violence.
“The Miller Center mission recognizes the world of vulnerable communities we now inhabit and the resurgence of hate that threatens them. Stated simply, the role of the center is to help break down barriers and instead to build bridges between vulnerable communities and law enforcement, vulnerable and majority communities and among the communities themselves”
– John J. Farmer, Jr.