When sheriff’s deputies in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, pulled over Octavio Lopez for an expired inspection tag in 2018, they wrote on his traffic ticket that he is white. Lopez, who is from Nicaragua, is Hispanic and speaks only Spanish, said his wife.
In fact, of the 167 tickets issued by deputies to drivers with the last name Lopez over a nearly six-year span, not one of the motorists was labeled as Hispanic, according to records provided by the Jefferson Parish clerk of court. The same was true of the 252 tickets issued to people with the last name of Rodriguez, 234 named Martinez, 223 with the last name Hernandez and 189 with the surname Garcia.
This kind of misidentification is widespread — and not without harm. Across America, law enforcement agencies have been accused of targeting Hispanic drivers, failing to collect data on those traffic stops, and covering up potential officer misconduct and aggressive immigration enforcement by identifying people as white on tickets.
“If everybody’s white, there can’t be any racial bias,” Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill, told WWNO/WRKF and ProPublica.
Nationally, states have tried to patch this data loophole and tighten controls against racial profiling. In recent years, legislators have passed widely hailed traffic stop data-collection laws in California, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Virginia and Washington, D.C. This April, Alabama became the 22nd state to enact similar legislation.
Though Louisiana has had its own data-collection requirement for two decades, it contains a loophole unlike any other state: It exempts law enforcement agencies from collecting and delivering data to the state if they have an anti-racial-profiling policy in place. This has rendered the law essentially worthless, said Josh Parker, a senior staff attorney at the Policing Project, a public safety research nonprofit at the New York University School of Law.
Louisiana State Rep. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, attempted to remove the exemption two years ago, but law enforcement agencies protested. Instead, he was forced to convene a task force to study the issue, which thus far hasn’t produced any results, he said.
“They don’t want the data because they know what it would reveal,” Duplessis said of law enforcement agencies.
To understand the impact of the state’s unique policy, WWNO/WRKF and ProPublica looked at nearly six years of data on traffic citations issued by the New Orleans Police Department in the state’s largest city, by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, and by the state police in Jefferson Parish. The parish was chosen because it has the largest Hispanic population in the state, and because the Sheriff’s Office, which is the primary police presence there, has been routinely accused by residents and local activists of harassing and profiling Hispanic people.
The data showed that of the almost 80,000 tickets that the Louisiana State Police handed out in Jefferson Parish over nearly six years, not a single one was issued to a person labeled as Hispanic.
It showed a similar pattern in Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office: Of the more than 73,000 traffic tickets the office issued between 2015 and September 2020, deputies identified only six of the cited people as Hispanic. As of 2020, Hispanics made up 18% of the parish’s population of more than 440,000.
By contrast, the New Orleans Police Department issued about 7,000 tickets to Hispanic people during the same period when the Sheriff’s Office claimed it issued only six. That represented 4% of all tickets in New Orleans, where the overall percentage of Hispanic people was 8% in 2020.
Baumgartner said that in many law enforcement agencies, there is “no real rhyme or reason or logic” to how officers classify race. “The white/black distinction is generally well recorded, but the Hispanic one is not. Many Hispanics are wrongly classified as white.” The data bears out Baumgartner’s point in an alarming way: Unlike Hispanic drivers, Black drivers in Jefferson Parish were cited at a rate 1.5 times what would be expected based on their share of the population.
State Police spokesperson Lt. Melissa Matey, as an explanation for not counting Hispanics, cited the current National Crime Information Center standards, which don’t include Hispanic as a race. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment.
While Hispanic is an ethnicity, more than 80% of law enforcement agencies use it as a race when collecting information from drivers during traffic stops, according to a sample of 69 departments studied by one expert on racial profiling.
Traffic stops are the most common interaction between citizens and police, and often lead to finding people who have outstanding warrants or who are in the country illegally. As a result, they present the most opportunities for abuse and misconduct, said Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School.
Failure to track and analyze traffic stop data has the potential to mask racial profiling, he cautioned, especially for the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s department, which has long been plagued by charges of racism. A
previous investigation by WWNO/WRKF and ProPublica found that more than 70% of the people Jefferson Parish deputies shot at during the past eight years were Black, more than double the parish’s Black population. And 12 of the 16 people who died after being shot or restrained by deputies during that time were Black men.
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white man so blatant...
