A local journalist in Texas recently discovered widespread racist policing across the state.
KXAN investigative reporter Brian Collister discovered that state law enforcement regularly issued traffic citations to Latino drivers before recording them as white in official state documentation. From Poynter:
The investigation, titled "Racial Profiling Whitewash," began in the aftermath of the Sandra Bland case, in which a Black woman was pulled over for a routine traffic stop that ended in a violent confrontation. She was arrested, and police found her hanged to death in her jail cell three days later.
The next month, state officials released a trove of documents that appeared to show the arresting officer in the Bland case stopped the same proportion of African American and White drivers.
KXAN looked into the documents and also began sorting through data on the 16 million traffic citations issued last year through the Texas Department of Public Safety. Something wasn't adding up—Collister noticed that "four of the top five names listed as White on Texas traffic citations sound Hispanic or Latino." From Poynter:
"We just did a truth test," Collister told Poynter. "We started with a five-year dataset with 16 million citations. The first thing we did was — sorted the last name column A-Z. We went to Gonzalez, Mendoza, Garcia, and we saw they all were showing up as White."
The station double-checked the data, pulling paper citations to be certain it was accurate. They even posted the actual citations online so viewers could see the proof. During the investigation, they tracked down some of the people on the citations to ask if they were White. Some of the people they spoke with couldn't believe anybody could mistake them as White. More than that, the police officers who pulled them over never asked about their ethnicity, they said.
Still think maybe it was a simple mistake? Check out Poynter's image compilation of some of the people cops classified as white.
Unsurprisingly, the paper couldn't find a single white person who was mistakenly identified as another ethnicity.
State law requires documenting ethnicity and race (which they inaccurately consider to be interchangeable). Ironically, the whole point of the law is to "curb" racial profiling. From Poynter:
At first, the state said KXAN's reports were wrong. But, after the stories aired, lawmakers hauled Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety into a hearing to explain how cops were doing their jobs. He ultimately told Collister, “You were right and we were wrong.”
The state now requires troopers "to do their best to identify a person's race and to tell the driver to change the designation on the ticket before they pay it."
Remarkably, even before these discrepancies were discovered, traffic stops involving white drivers were declining in the state, while stops involving drivers of color were rising. KXAN’s investigation proves the problem is even bigger than many realized.