At the outset, the task force seemed promising.
After a turbulent summer of racial-justice protests in 2020, followed by a graduate-student strike in September, the University of Michigan promised to examine the role of policing and public safety on the Ann Arbor campus. University leaders would convene an inclusive task force as part of a series of antiracism commitments.
The provost, a Black woman, would oversee the group. Two star Black professors were tapped to serve as co-chairs. Most of its 20 members were people of color. The final report would be made public, university leaders said.
For some faculty, staff, and students, the task force’s creation was a sign that university leaders were finally willing to have a serious conversation about how the presence of armed police officers on campus made people of color feel unsafe. The panel’s members included people who had called for the university to move toward the abolition of the campus police.
“I felt hopeful about this particular initiative because on paper it had done the right things,” said David Helps, a Ph.D. candidate in history who was on the panel.
But as Helps and other task-force members see it, the effort was ultimately set up to fail.
In its final report, obtained by The Chronicle, the task force makes clear that its four-month timeline — just a single semester — was too short to answer complicated questions about racial bias in safety and security. Requests for university data on arrests, stops, and use of force took months to satisfy or went unfulfilled entirely. The group’s requests for an extension were denied.
Though the task force had been touted as an antiracism initiative, the group’s final report, which has yet to be made public, stresses that it didn’t have the capacity to directly address antiracism — in other words, the role of structural racism in policing.
The task force’s co-chairs said that despite some challenges, the group did what it was supposed to do: Start a conversation about rethinking public safety at Michigan. They said they expected the final report to be made public within a couple of weeks.
For several members, however, the task force didn’t meet the moment. Instead of centering the voices of Black and brown people, they said, it ended up serving largely as a sounding board for parents of undergraduates, most of them white, who opposed scaling back the university’s police presence. Toward the end of the spring semester, in the shadow of the trial of Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd, they said much of the group’s work descended into tension and frustration.
What happened at Michigan is a sign of how even well-intentioned diversity efforts can fall short — and of the fraught, messy debates ahead for colleges across the country as campus policing continues to be called into question.
A Narrowing Scope
Signs of trouble for the panel emerged early on. The task force’s initial statement of its scope and objectives called for the group to conduct “a holistic review and assessment” of Michigan’s public-safety practices, including examining university data and research, holding community forums and focus groups, and making specific recommendations based on best practices.
The six task-force members who spoke to The Chronicle said they quickly expressed concern during initial meetings that the mission was too tall for one semester. They weren’t being paid, and were juggling full-time studies and jobs. In a March letter to the provost, obtained by The Chronicle, a majority of the task force’s members noted that they’d requested more time during a meeting with university leaders in February, and asked once again. It didn’t happen.
Instead of an extended timeline, Helps said, the task force’s scope was narrowed. In an amended statement of its mission, “holistic review” was changed to “initial comprehensive review.” More emphasis was placed on the need for “further study and engagement beyond the task force.” To Helps, it felt as if the university was watering down the group’s work when it had hardly begun.
The limited purview wasn’t what some task-force members expected when they signed up. They thought they would be doing an in-depth, nuanced exploration of what public safety should look like at the university, in light of national attention on police violence against people of color.
Bryan K. Roby, an assistant professor of Judaic studies, said he thought the task force was going to grapple with the full spectrum of safety issues — questions of psychological safety as well as physical safety, and how the meaning of safety can differ across racial lines. The final mission document called for the task force to “make sure that all people on our campus not only are safe, but actually feel safe.”
But the review ended up largely focused on physical safety in the context of Michigan’s Division of Public Safety and Security, Roby said, and mostly left unanswered questions about mental health, trauma, and other psychological aspects of safety.
What’s more, the statement of mission contained what some felt was a contradiction. It instructed the task force to “pay particular attention to the experiences and perspectives of our communities of color, and others who are disproportionately impacted by challenging national policing policies and practices.”
But it also stressed that “we must recognize that policing will play a uniquely critical role in our success.” That line seemed to rule out the possibility of diverting much of the Division of Public Safety and Security’s budget from policing to community resources, a key demand from the graduate-student strike that had prompted the formation of the task force.
“If you’re serious about exploring why the status quo is not working for people, then you can’t say, ‘Well, the status quo can’t change,’” Helps said.
The Presence of the Police
The group’s work was further complicated, several members said, by the presence on the panel of officials from the very division that the task force was reviewing.
When the university announced the task force’s members, the list included both the executive director and the deputy chief of Michigan’s Division of Public Safety and Security. Eddie L. Washington Jr., the executive director, transitioned into an ex officio role halfway through the semester. Crystal James, the deputy chief, remained a full member. James wrote in an email that she couldn’t comment until the final report was made public, but said the division is committed to transparency and building trust.
It appeared that the university was trying to have all sides of the policing debate represented on the panel. But several members said Washington’s and James’s presence had made it difficult to have objective conversations about the future of policing on campus. The task force also wanted members of the campus community to testify openly about any traumatic experiences they may have had with law enforcement, Helps said, and having police officers in the room felt like an impediment to that.
Just because a majority of the panel’s members were people of color didn’t mean that the group was antiracist, said Thomas Vance, a task-force member and 2021 Michigan graduate. “If you want to dismantle institutionally racist structures, it starts by listening to the people who are most affected,” Vance said, “and that really didn’t happen.”
The focus groups designed to solicit feedback from students, conducted virtually, drew very few participants, according to the final report. Students were suffering Zoom fatigue after months of virtual classes, Vance said, and needed an incentive to spend more time on video. The task force asked the university for funding to pay focus-group participants, but didn’t receive any.
In community forums and elsewhere, white parents of undergraduates who opposed defunding the police often seemed like the loudest voices, some task-force members said.
The task force conducted a survey about perceptions of policing on Michigan’s campus. According to the group’s February status report, a plurality of the 432 survey respondents — about 30 percent — were parents, while 24 percent were undergraduate or graduate students. The status report noted that “a sizable number” of survey respondents said they’d allowed their children to enroll at Michigan only because the university had a trained police force.
Kimberly Yourick, the lone parent representative on the task force and a former police officer, said the strong responses from some parents stemmed from their frustration with the graduate students who had gone on strike. At the start of the fall semester, when those parents were already worried about how the pandemic was affecting their children’s education, Yourick wrote in an emailed statement, they saw graduate students refusing to teach classes.
When the strike dragged on because the university wouldn’t agree to significantly cut its police budget, she added, that rubbed many parents the wrong way. (The graduate students called off the strike after 10 days, facing legal threats from the university.)
“I agree with other task-force members that it would have been the best-case scenario to have many more viewpoints from parents who have students of color, and also to have more feedback from Bipoc students,” she said, referring to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Still, she said, the task force accomplished a lot, including securing a commitment from the Division of Public Safety and Security to communicate more and build better relationships with students.
“I don’t think lasting and meaningful change happens by our university community having to speak through news articles, protests, and litigation,” she said. “Meaningful change happens when a student leader can knock on the office door of the director of DPSS and talk to him about an issue without all of these barriers.”
Denial of Data
The task force wasn’t going to be able to answer every complicated question about public safety and racism in one semester, said Earl Lewis, one of the co-chairs and a professor and founding director of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions. Lewis, a former provost of Emory University and former head of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, said the task force’s scope and semesterlong timeline was clear from the beginning. (Susan M. Collins, who became provost in the summer of 2020 and convened the task force, wasn’t made available for an interview.)
In Lewis’s view, having police officers in task-force meetings and community forums didn’t stymie conversations at all. The group’s wide-ranging perspectives were an asset, he said. He added that the public-safety representatives in the group were deeply committed to improving.
Daphne C. Watkins, the other co-chair and a professor of social work, said moving ahead quickly with the task force was much better than the alternatives — no university action at all, or a delayed response two or three years from now.
Watkins said the group had accomplished a lot with the time it had, compiling a 50-page final report. The report spells out 29 recommendations, including that the Division of Public Safety and Security focus on nonpunitive approaches, and that the university evaluate the division’s structure and increase mental-health resources. It also calls for Michigan to review campus public safety regularly.
The task-force members who spoke with The Chronicle believed that the university had set out with genuine intentions to tackle a complicated issue thoughtfully. But several of them were disappointed that those efforts didn’t translate into meaningful antiracist work.
The lack of data became the greatest source of frustration. Michigan’s Division of Public Safety and Security didn’t provide some of the requested data until a couple of weeks before the task force’s final report was due; other data were never provided.
Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at Michigan and a task-force member, researches campus policing. Police departments were founded to protect white people and property, Davis said, and that legacy continues today. So he supports abolishing the police, especially on college campuses. “Having police is totally antithetical to the educational mission of our institutions,” he said.
The task force discussed alternatives to policing, Davis said. But without access to much of the necessary public-safety data, he said, it wasn’t possible to, for instance, make a compelling case for diverting some of the police budget to mental-health services. Lewis said much of the problem stemmed from decentralized, inadequate record-keeping. That, Watkins said, “was really out of our control.” The final report calls for better data transparency and breakdowns by race of, among other things, complaints made against campus police officers.
As some task-force members see it, the group’s failures are another sign that the university remains beholden to the interests of white donors and parents, and isn’t willing to do what it takes to fully commit to racial justice.
Over the course of the spring, said Vance, the recent graduate, he had to come to terms with the fact that the final outcome was going to feel inadequate. Vance had also been speaker of Michigan’s Black Student Union and part of the Students of Color Liberation Front, a coalition of multicultural campus organizations. In his application to Columbia University’s law school, where he’ll enroll this fall, he had written about being part of the task force.
Now, Vance feels burned. What does he have to show for all his work?
Helps had hoped that the urgency of recent conversations about racial inequity had set the stage for real change at Michigan. But it felt as if institutional inertia had taken over, he said, and the task force ended up simply making vague recommendations to inform the next stage of deliberations. That, he said, “seemed like a real about-face and perhaps, for many people, a kind of betrayal.”
