Public safety chief to take Hopkins job Robinson to handle hospital security

During Mr. Robinson's tenure, the prison system has been troubled with riots, escapes, mistaken inmate releases and confusion over a patchwork of outdated regulations governing sentence calculations. He went through two correction chiefs before settling on Mr. Lanham.

Through all the crises, he managed with a Teflon-like ability to emerge unscathed.

In his new job, he will be responsible for the 44-acre Hopkins complex, which is bounded generally by Madison, Chester, Orleans and Caroline streets. That area encompasses the hospital, the schools of medicine, nursing, and hygiene and public health, and the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Mr. Robinson grew up in the McCulloh Street projects and became a police officer, starting in 1952 as a foot patrolman. Quickly making a name for himself as an officer who could snag drug dealers, he was recruited the next year to become a federal undercover agent, often posing as a pimp or dope dealer on out-of-town assignments.

Saying the travel as federal agent was too much, Mr. Robinson returned to the city Police Department in 1954. He worked in narcotics through 1964. He left the ranks of the detectives in 1967 to become an instructor at the police academy in 1967 and earned his first command as chief of the Eastern District in 1971. Six years later, he became deputy commissioner until Mr. Schaefer appointed him the city's first black police commissioner.