Pennsylvania Mayor Running for Congress Tapped Professor Known for Singling Out White Students To Train Cops on Their 'Unconscious Bias'

Scranton's police officers didn't ask for a seminar on their souls. They got one anyway, courtesy of Mayor Paige Cognetti, who decided in the summer of 2020 that the answer to a national moment of chaos was to bring in a Penn State professor with a track record of putting white students on the spot in class and lecture cops about the bias lurking in their subconscious. That's the program. Not de-escalation training, not better equipment, not more backup on night shifts. A diversity consultant with an axe to grind about "privilege."

There's a difference between wanting police to treat people fairly, which everyone wants, and importing a professor's pet theory about white guilt into a police department because it was the fashionable thing to do that summer. Cognetti didn't have to pick this particular academic. She chose someone whose entire public profile is built around calling out white people specifically. That's not an accident, and it's not a neutral training decision. It's a mayor outsourcing her department's culture to whoever had the loudest microphone in 2020.

Now she wants to go to Congress, and voters in the Eighth District deserve to know this wasn't some minor administrative footnote. It's a preview of judgment. If this is how she staffs a police training program in her own city, it's worth asking what kind of advisors and priorities she'd bring to Washington, where the stakes and the checks get a lot smaller.

None of this is about defending bad policing. It's about noticing when a leader reaches for ideology dressed up as expertise, and calling it what it is.