Texas troopers ticketing Hispanic drivers as white Senator says DPS ‘playing games’ with racial profiling data By Brian Collister and Joe Ellis Published: November 6, 2015, 2:12 pm Updated: January 12, 2016, 5:32 pm Senator: DPS ‘playing games’ Senator Rodriguez demands an explanation DPS responds to KXAN’s investigation Example tickets State of Texas: In-depth – Law enforcement ticketing minority drivers as ‘white’ AUSTIN (KXAN) — DPS troopers are inaccurately recording the race of large numbers of minority drivers, mostly Hispanic, as white, according to a KXAN investigation. The agency’s traffic stop data reveals racial profiling reports are likely flawed, according to experts.

From KXAN:Of course, this also means that crime statistics include a lot of not exactly white criminals, especially Hispanics, being lumped in with whites. For example, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics recognizes only three races in homicide statistics: Black, White (which includes most Latinos), and a small Other (presumably, mostly Asians and American Indians).

After years of labeling mestizos as white, the state of Texas has recently taken to listing its Top Ten Most Wanted List with Hispanics labeled as “White (Hispanic).”

My guess is that law enforcement’s aversion to listing Hispanics as different from whites goes back to LULAC’s campaign in the post-War era to get Latinos declared to be just plain white, which is why there was no separate category for Hispanics on the 1950 and 1960 Censuses.

Plus, eye-witness reports can be vague. To witnesses, the fundamental racial categories tend to be Black and Not Black. Thus, Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels always have a Problematically Latino character: a guy whose mom is Mexican but his dad is Swedish so he doesn’t look mestizo, or a guy who kind of looks Latino but is actually half Arab, or maybe a Filipino with a Spanish surname who looks mostly Oriental but maybe could be the kind of Latino the other Latinos call “Chino,” and so forth and so on.

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