“If Everybody’s White, There Can’t Be Any Racial Bias”: The Disappearance of Hispanic Drivers From Traffic Records

Racial profiling of Latina/os by police is commonly called “driving while brown,” which even is the title of a book about Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s policy of targeting Latina/o drivers in Arizona.  

An article produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WRFK and WWNO discusses how is-identification of Latino/a drivers as “white” in records for traffic stops, renders invisible the racial profiling of Latina/os by police.   Here is the problem in a nutshell:

“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.

`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 . . . . ” (bold added)

KJ