Report Raises New Questions About Racial Bias At Wake Forest University

A story in the Wake Forest University student newspaper is questioning the merit of a study on bias in the university police department.

Buck Hinman is a student journalist with Old Gold & Black who looked into the Williams/Moss report. It was released in 2014 in response to allegations of racial bias against university officers. The study, written by two retired police chiefs, found no evidence of racial bias, stating the arrest rate of black students at Wake Forest University is in line with other North Carolina institutions and communities.

In Hinman's report, he found that black students were nearly four times as likely to get arrested than white students over a seven year period. 

In an interview with WFDD's Emily McCord, Hinman says the more he looked into the numbers, the more questions he had about the report's integrity.

Interview Highlights:

On what Hinman found in the report:

"The evidence that the report uses to support its claims that there's no racial bias is flawed on a statistical level… One of the things they do is they compare the percentages of black and white students that have been arrested at Wake Forest's campus to other universities in the area. But they don't take into account the proportion of the black and white students that make up each campus.

For example, they compare Wake Forest to Winston-Salem State. Winston-Salem State is a historically black university, so the majority of students there are black. But they just compare the percent of blacks and whites and not the fact that blacks make up such a higher proportion of the campus. Black students only make up 6.6 percent of campus, so the fact they make 23.5 percent of arrests is a much higher disparity than, say, Winston-Salem State which has 100 percent of arrests involving black students. So that sort of comparison, I felt, was meaningless."

Why, if this report was released in 2014 and it's older data, are we still talking about this?

"First off, we have the national conversation that's going on right now at college campuses across the country. But here at Wake Forest... the fact of the matter is this report is still up on the university's website. None of the administration, in the last 1.5 years, addressed the merits of the report. And there are still a lot of questions remaining, especially considering that every student I've talked to during this investigation said that they still felt that racial profiling was still a continuing issue with university police and that not enough had been done to address the issue."

University officials declined to comment for this story. But Wake Forest police chief Regina Lawson told Hinman the department has worked hard on better student outreach and police have started using body cameras.