A Small Group of Citizen Researchers Takes on One County's Criminal Justice System

In late August, a group of citizen-activists in Washtenaw County, Michigan, released a report proving, with publicly available data from the county’s circuit court, that systemic racism is alive and well in the justice system of this self-identified progressive community.

After analyzing more than 3,600 felony charges in 11 case categories, the group found that county prosecutors were between 22% and 1,150% more likely to charge a Black or other person of color than a white person—in other words, according to the report, "...in Washtenaw County, a person of color is anywhere from three to 29 times as likely to be charged with one of the 11 case categories than a white person."

Prosecutors also filed more charges on average against people of color than against white people—a difference that ranged from 12.8% to 62.9%, depending on the category.

The court system is also at least somewhat at fault. While the citizen researchers didn't find a pattern of racial disparities in sentencing across the entire Washtenaw County Court, most of the judges “contributed to a wide racial disparity in the average minimum/maximum sentence in armed robbery cases.”

The report also found 23 instances in which individual judges issued harsher sentences or whose sentences reflected racial disparities. More than half of those issues, 13, were in decisions rendered by one judge—Archie Brown.

Reaction to the August 27 release of Citizens for Racial Equity in Washtenaw’s (CREW) report has been fast, and it has been growing.

While the former prosecutor’s office issued a statement denying the department made charging decisions based on race, the presumptive incoming prosecutor, Eli Savit, spent September on a Criminal Justice Listening Tour that included the chief judge of the county’s circuit court and other officials. The chief judge, Carol Kuhnke, issued a statement saying the court takes the concerns raised by the report seriously and “[we] are committed to working collaboratively with our partners in the justice system and the community to address them.”

Growing impact

On January 5, Savit, who entered the general election unopposed and has taken office as prosecutor, announced a first for Michigan—a “Prosecutor Transparency Project” in collaboration with the ACLU of Michigan and the University of Michigan Law School to analyze data from the prosecutors to uncover possible racial inequities in the department’s decision-making process.

Members of CREW have been invited to work on various projects with Savit’s office, and both local and national organizations have contacted them to learn more about how they can launch their own, similar initiatives.

All of these waves were created by a group of less than 20 citizen activists. It took them just six months, some self-funding, and a one-time $10,000 grant from the ACLU of Michigan to hire an expert analyst to extract the facts from the data the group collected.

CREW isn’t even a formally organized 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organization. And though the group’s main organizers are well-educated professionals including attorneys, the legal director of the ACLU of Michigan, a former state representative, and faith leaders, they say that virtually any group of citizens should be able to use publicly available data to report on their local criminal justice systems and use that data to advocate for change.

From a conversation to a commitment

CREW founding member and co-Chair MaryAnn Sarosi told Blue Tent that the idea for the group’s work occurred after a conversation with the Rev. Joseph Summers of Ann Arbor’s Episcopal Church of the Incarnation. Both Sarosi and Summers are longtime activists in overlapping areas of criminal justice, including youth justice. (Full disclosure: Rev. Summers is my vicar.)

“[Summers] and I have often lamented that we know there are racial disparities in the system, but we can’t see it,” she said.

However, one day in “March or April,” Sarosi recalls, she realized that the county’s courts do actually have at least some data.

“I was on the court's website looking up a case record for a defendant... and I realized there is data on the court and charging decisions by the prosecutor. It's just in individual case records.” Sarosi contacted Summers; he recruited volunteers from his congregation, and they began pulling data from the court’s website and putting it into an Excel spreadsheet, one case at a time.

It took Sarosi roughly half an hour to train each of the 10 to 12 volunteers who came forward to help compile the data. “It wasn’t hard. It just had to be consistent,” she said, regarding pulling the same information on each case and entering that information into the spreadsheet correctly.

Taking the next steps

Sarosi said the May murder of George Floyd spurred the small group to take the next step. “I remember saying to Joe, ‘it can’t just be you and me. Let’s get a committee together, a citizens’ committee.’ And then I have this weird talent with acronyms, and so I came up with this Citizens for Racial Equality in Washtenaw, and then Joe and I figured out people that would be on it, the right combination of people.”

The “right combination of people” included Summers, Ann Arbor attorney and Michigan Advocacy Program board member Linda Rexer and former Michigan State Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith. Dan Korobkin, the legal director of the ACLU of Michigan and an Ann Arbor resident, also joined the group.

In the beginning, CREW’s members funded incidental expenses themselves. When it was time to hire an analyst to extract meaning from their data, though, they turned to the ACLU and received a $10,000 grant to hire the expert who had previously done the statistical analysis for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Criminal Justice Policy Commission. The hire was “a strategic decision,” Sarosi said, because the group wanted to present results that were obviously “something rock-solid and legitimate.”

A lack of data is part of the problem

In addition to securing funding for the right analyst, the other main challenge CREW faced was a scarcity of data.

“We haven’t looked at the law enforcement side of this at all,” Wheeler Smith said. “We [also] had no data for the prosecutor’s office.” Instead, they had to depend entirely on what could be gleaned from court records of individual cases.

“I guess our understanding grew as we developed the projects and the reports that there were limitations to the data that was available to us. And so we did what I think any good project team does, which is to make the best and the most of what we had,” Korobkin explained.

Despite these hurdles, though, CREW organizers believe it’s possible to replicate their success in other counties.

“Every group that wants to do this [needs] to figure out what’s available to them, what’s not available to them, and make the most of what they have,” including using their results as a platform to demand that more of their local area’s criminal justice data is made publicly available.

“Given that the courts aren’t paying attention to this information, a citizens group that is able to get a hold of it gets themselves in a position of power, because now, the court needs to respond,” Summers explained.

No special expertise required

Even groups that don’t have the expertise to troll through a court’s online systems can get started by observing the courts in person. From October 2016 to March 2017, a different citizens group, Friends of Restorative Justice in Washtenaw County sent 14 trained court observers into the county’s juvenile courts and compiled a report on systemic racism there.

As for funding, Korobkin had a suggestion for Blue Tent readers: “To the extent that your readership is not just grassroots, but grass-top organizations, I hope that there is an appetite for funding this kind of work,” he said, whether that funding goes to training volunteers, creating a template for finding and reporting criminal justice data, “or simply organizing community meetings where leadership can grow around these issues.”

The CREW report is a “model to really demonstrate that this can happen anywhere, and we all ought to be trying to support that in any way we can,” he added.