Human Rights Policing Program
(Go to the course here.)
Peter Marina and retired NOPD Lieutenant and current educator Pedro Marina will soon be offering a state-certified, Human Rights Policing program for law enforcement officials across the United States.
Police officers have always been an important part of protecting human rights and recently, due to reasons beyond the control of most individual police officers, this perception is severely threatened.
We define human rights as:
These universal human rights recognize that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Furthermore, all humans possess inalienable rights, and among them include the rights to dignity, respect, safety, security, liberty, health, peace, and movement.
The United Nations General Assembly created this Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 Paris. Nations from all regions around the world agreed to this document that sets the standards of achievement in protecting the universal human rights of all people. For the first time in history, world leaders agreed that all humans inherently possess human rights and that the primary responsibility of governments are to defend and respect these rights for all people.
This online, 10- to 12-week, four-module certificate of completion is built with state-of-the-art curriculum for your law enforcement personnel to complete around their work schedule. Human Rights Policing offers new and innovative training on the relationship between human rights and policing in society. Police officers will have the opportunity to learn about how to apply human rights to their everyday policing practices. Police departments will be able to improve the quality of their departments by having their police officers fully trained and certified in human rights policing. In today’s political climate, we believe that human rights policing training will help law enforcement safely and humanely address the many challenges they face while providing safety in our communities. We believe that Human Rights Policing will become an established model for the rest of the country and set the standards for policing in the world today.
Professor Biographies
Peter Marina received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York City and currently works as a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. Dr. Marina’s work incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography that allows him to penetrate and interact with a wide range of culturally diverse social groups — from public high school youths and street kids, to police officers and Hispanic immigrants, to religiously inspired residents of the inner-city and charismatic religious leaders in the Caribbean, and most recently, to down and out urban dwellers — in a quest to make empirical and theoretical sense of this rapidly changing, surprising and highly contradictory late-modern world. Marina recently published his latest book Down and Out in New Orleans: Transgressive Living in the Informal Economy with Columbia University Press.
Pedro Marina is a retired New Orleans Police Lieutenant for the New Orleans Police Department with thirty years of law-enforcement experience in the Big Easy. He graduated from the University of New Orleans with a degree in sociology and joined the New Orleans Police Department in 1975. Before being promoted to the Civil Service rank of sergeant he served in the Vice Crime Section, the Second Police District in uptown New Orleans as a patrol officer, the Robbery Unit of the Major Crimes Division, The Special Operations Bureau as a SWAT officer and twelve years as narcotics agent. After being promoted to sergeant, Marina served in the Eighth District in the New Orleans French Quarter as a platoon supervisor before returning to the Narcotics Section as a platoon commander. While serving in that section he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and reassigned to the Eighth District as platoon commander. Lieutenant Marina retired in 2003 from the Third Police District where he was serving as a platoon commander. During his career the Lieutenant received numerous awards for exemplary performance in the line of duty. After his retirement, the Lieutenant returned to the University of New Orleans to earn certification in the State of Louisiana to teach social studies and Spanish. He is presently teaching Spanish at Lakeshore High School in Mandeville, Louisiana.