Citizens for Racial Equity in Washtenaw

CREW is a local community’s response to the silence that keeps us from meaningfully confronting racial inequality in the legal system.   The silence created when mere stories of unequal treatment of People of Color aren’t enough to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.  The silence that allows potential bias to fester undetected and harm so many.   When CREW dug into publicly available court data we found disparities in the sentencing and charging of People of Color in the Washtenaw County criminal legal system.  

Armed with data, CREW breaks the silence.   

Data that shows a depth and breadth of racial disparities regarding decisions by prosecutors and judges that raises questions and calls for answers.  The data compiled by CREW makes noise. No one can turn back towards the silence and acknowledge that, yes, our legal system is flawed but we lack the data to understand those flaws or rectify them.  

Read our report.  The noise is deafening.