Addressing the Policing Crisis: Michael Needed Changes, Laurie Anderson

ADDRESSING THE POLICING CRISIS: MICHAEL ROBINSON LOOKS AT THE LETHAL USE OF FORCE AND NEEDED CHANGES

Michael A. Robinson, MSW, PhD Associate Professor and MSW Admission Coordinator

by Laurie Anderson

Even after the Ferguson riots, it didn’t occur to Michael Robinson to research the frequency of police killings of unarmed Blacks. The African American academic was not studying law enforcement practices, but a brief encounter with a total stranger changed the direction of his research.

“A student who I’d never seen before, a young African American male, came up to me and said, ‘What are you doing about these police killings of Black men?’

“And I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“He said, ‘That’s what I thought.’ And then he walked away.”

Robinson never saw the man again, but the conversation bothered him so much that after he joined the faculty of the School of Social Work at the University of Georgia in 2015 he began a new line of inquiry.

Robinson wondered how the incidence of police killings of civilians compared across races. He started looking for statistics, but could not find a reliable database anywhere on the subject. Of 18,000 police agencies in the U.S. only 2%-3% reported to any type of database, and did so voluntarily.

“The only way to find out about it was through the newspapers,” he said.

Two newspapers – the Washington Post and the United Kingdom’s Guardian – were tracking police-involved deaths in the U.S., but their data differed for the same periods. It took Robinson and two student assistants months of comparing the data and combing through other news sources to get a reasonably reliable accounting for a single year – 2015.

The data showed that unarmed African American men were being killed by police at almost five times the rate of unarmed white men, despite being roughly 7% of the U.S. population.

“Then I started noticing a pattern,” said Robinson. The largest number of killings of unarmed Blacks by police were in former slave-holding states. The deaths were highest in Maryland and Virginia, states that originated restrictive laws known as