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A Massachusetts organization devoted to supporting people of color working in the criminal justice system named Northeastern’s Michael Davis a distinguished fellow.
Davis, the university’s vice president of global safety and policing, received the honor from the George Lewis Ruffin Society during an induction ceremony held Wednesday night at Northeastern’s Alumni Center.
The Ruffin Society was founded 40 years ago in partnership with Northeastern. Jack McDevitt, a university professor emeritus and member of the society’s board of directors, said Davis was a natural choice for the first group of 18 honorees.
“He’s done a remarkable job of bringing public safety to all of the Northeastern campuses and dealing with the complexity of having students all over the world,” said McDevitt, who previously headed Northeastern’s Institute on Race and Justice.
“We have students on co-op everywhere around the world. The notion of what you have to do to make everyone safe at Northeastern has changed dramatically,” from keeping students safe in their dorm rooms to bringing them home from war zones, McDevitt said.
“Davis has really championed and embraced this larger mission,” McDevitt said.
Davis said it was an honor to receive acknowledgment from his peers, especially since he is not originally from Massachusetts.
He arrived at Northeastern in 2013 from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, where he served as chief of police and has since gone on to earn a doctorate in law and policy from Northeastern.
Davis said he also appreciated the fact that the evening’s other honorees came from a variety of backgrounds. In addition to Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox, they included MBTA Transit Police Chief Kenneth Green, Suffolk County District Attorney Keith Hayde, Cambridge Police Commissioner Christine Elow and others.
“We work very closely with the Boston Police Department. It’s important we have these relationships wherever we are in the world,” Davis said.
“It’s great to get together and be acknowledged for the collective work we do,” said Davis, who served as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, Policing project that created a series of guidelines for best police practices.
Another honoree with Northeastern ties was new Somerville Police Chief Shumeane Benford, who started his law enforcement career in 1992 working in security at the university.
“Northeastern sent me to my first police academy,” said Benford, a lifelong Boston resident who previously served as police chief of the Boston Housing Authority and Boston’s chief of emergency management.
Keynote speaker Jonathan Tynes, an associate justice of the Boston Municipal Court, holds a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law.
Unlike other Black trailblazers, George Lewis Ruffin is not a household name or the subject of a Hollywood movie, Tynes said.
But he said Ruffin, who became the first Black graduate of Harvard Law School in 1869 and was appointed as a judge in the municipal court of Charlestown in 1883, made way for the people of color being honored that evening.
“In this room right now we have an abundance of firsts, and this speaks to both the triumph and tragedy of the legacy of justice,” Tynes said.
The triumph is the abundance of talent in the room; the tragedy “is that it has taken so long for this moment to arrive and that the remaining road to justice is yet longer still,” said Tynes, who also talked about the legacy of the death of George Floyd.
In 1984, when the society was founded, “most of the people who were police officers, judges and probation officers were white, and we needed to do a better job of bringing diversity” to the system, McDevitt said.
The Ruffin Society is closely affiliated with Northeastern’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the evening’s speakers included school director Amy Farrell and Kellee Tsai, dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
“Most of the (society’s) meetings are held here,” McDevitt said. “We staff events with students and faculty. We offer research that our faculty is doing that is relevant to the concerns of the Ruffin Society, and the Ruffin Society in turn offers us co-op positions and research opportunities.”