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Old Gold&Black
C E L E B R AT I N G 1 0 0 Y E A R S O F WA K E F O R E S T ’ s S T U D E N T N E W S PA P E R VOL. 100, NO. 2
T H U R S D AY, J A N U A R Y 2 1 , 2 0 1 6
www.wfuogb.com
“Cover s the campus like the magnolias”
Graphic by Buck Hinman and Chris Caswell/ Old Gold & Black
Statistics accessible on the Wake Forest University Police website reveal black students were arrested at a rate nearly four times higher than their demographic representation on campus from 2007-2014. A university-issued report claims the gap is not evidence of racial bias, but many remain skeptical.
Stats show racial gap in student arrests A third-party report found no signs of racial bias, but the analysis raises questions BY BUCK HINMAN Staff Writer hinmsb12@wfu.edu Senior Debbie Marke just wanted to go home. After a bad experience at a party one night during her freshman year, Marke, who is black, decided to walk back to her residence hall, trying to fight the tears running down her face. But as she passed by the library, following the raucous crowds of drunk, white students stumbling back to first-year housing, she was approached by two campus police officers.
She thought they were going to ask her why she was upset. Instead, she says the two officers demanded to see identification to prove she was a student. As she stood crying in front of them, the officers detained her for what felt like minutes. They looked down at her ID, looked back up at her, then down again, then up again. The officers released her, but she said they did not stop any of the other students around her to conduct the same ID check. “It’s a pretty degrading feeling,” she said. “It makes you feel like you don’t belong and that you’re an ‘other.’” Marke is one of many black students who shared their stories as part of an OGB investigation into claims of racial bias in Wake Forest’s police department. Reflecting a trend nationally, and especially among students at Ithaca College
in upstate New York and Providence College, many black students at Wake Forest say that they have been profiled or singled out by University Police simply because of their skin color. These allegations mirror larger protests around the country in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Greensboro, N.C. and Chapel Hill, where mounting evidence shows an unusually high number of confrontations between local, mostly white, police forces and black citizens. Wake Forest faces similar racial disparities between the number of black and white students arrested or stopped for identification on campus, according to an analysis of statistics hidden in plain sight on the WFUPD website in the Williams/Moss Report and the Yearly Arrest Data. Black students attending Wake Forest made up 23.5 percent of arrests between 2007-2014, despite representing just 6.6
percent of the campus population. This means they were arrested nearly four times as often as white students. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” says Akosua Tuffuor, a black senior from New Jersey. “People know racial profiling exists on campus. Our campus is not the bubble people think it is. So goes Wake Forest, so goes the nation.” In response to the statistics available on her department’s website, Regina Lawson, the chief of Wake Forest’s Campus Police, said in an interview with the OGB that while the numbers are concerning, she believes they show no evidence of racial bias in the department. “We’ve had it investigated,” she said. “At this point, we’ve taken all the measures we can to determine that when we take enforc-
See Profiling, Page 4