Chief Lawson
We are addressing this open letter to you as a collective, rather than individuals and plan to share it among administrators, faculty, and students.
On Thursday, March 6th, at a town hall meeting focusing on campus security, you cited several statistics indicating that a disproportionate numbers of minority students are regularly cited or arrested on campus. We are grateful for your participation in the meeting and for your sharing of those data, but also find these statistics deeply disturbing. In combination with student testimony presented at the town hall meeting, they deepen our conviction that racial bias is pervasive and present in the enforcement of campus policies and in the monitoring of student gatherings. This is an unacceptable state of affairs, and one that requires swift attention and collaborative action. In the six weeks since the town hall meeting, students have made several requests for these specific data – by email and in person. Each request has been ignored, deflected, or re-directed. We therefore request the prompt publication of all statistics collected by the Wake Forest University Police Department pertaining to arrests, citations, and incident reports, and that these be disaggregated by demographics of those involved by Wednesday, April 30th 2014. We believe having the data before the summer is crucial for beginning a more informed dialogue and for ensuring that momentum on this issue continues through the break. The timely publication of data is of paramount importance for several reasons.
First, solutions must be data-driven – There is an important debate happening among our students whether problems related to race can be resolved by policy-reform or whether it requires comprehensive cultural change. This is not to say we think either approaches are mutually exclusive. Both approaches will be needed for a comprehensive solution. The public release of the arrest and incident reports is a crucial step in establishing transparency and correcting the trust deficit that currently exists between students, administrators, and police officers. Although there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence, the statistics collected by Wake Forest University Police are crucial to verifying the depth of the problems voiced by students.
Second, students must be an integral part of any solution – Policy reforms to large-event policies, off-campus guests, or the police department will have shortcomings when they fail to take into account the experiences of those directly affected by policy implementation. Students perceive that administrators see students as a transient population and deliberate with one another behind closed doors instead of actively involving students in the decision-making process. Only a public release of policing data can accommodate successful student organizing because it gives students the information necessary to make informed and responsible decisions as major stake-holders in changing campus culture.
Third, it is a crucial time in the history of Wake Forest – Although the campus has made strides in regards to increased diversity in the student population, it still has a long way to go to create an accommodating environment for a diverse population of students. The increased frequency of events hosted and organized by black students has been accompanied by even greater increases in targeted policing of students of color. Beyond policing at black Greek events, personal testimonies from numerous students verify that racial profiling is a serious problem on campus. Students are increasingly having their Wake Forest experiences defined by exclusion both from mainstream campus culture as well as the decision-making processes that result in policies that have a disproportionate effect on minority students.
A university that does not release this statistical evidence is not a university that values transparency and accountability. We look forward to the release of this data because it will build the transparency necessary to accommodate robust student partnerships with the university. We value the service the university police provide to keep our campus safe, and we are confident the university police will take the steps we requested here to foster trust and confidence for all members of the campus community. As Wake Forest continues to grow and become more diverse, students will demand more accountability from their university. Students want to actualize a vision of what Pro Humanitate means in 2014. What does it mean if UPD or the administration delays to wait students out until the summer begins? More importantly, what does the refusal to publish data mean for students currently organizing among themselves? Perhaps it demonstrates that the race problems on campus run much deeper than profiling, policing, and pepper spray.
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