Sarah Rana was shocked when she read the police officer’s notes: female, non-white.

“It astonished me, if anything, because not only was it irrelevant to anything, it was just a routine traffic infraction,” she said.

Rana’s complaint has caused the Waterloo Regional Police Service to update its system to no longer record a person’s race as merely “white” or “non-white.”

But the 25-year-old student says the change needs to happen at police services across the country.

Rana, who is studying law in Florida, was pulled over for going through a red light in August while visiting her mother in Waterloo. She went to court to fight the ticket and received a copy of the officer’s notes, which listed her as polite, courteous and non-white.

Rana, who was born and raised in Waterloo, said she found it offensive that the police would not identify an ethnicity, but simply define her by the fact that she wasn’t white.

“I felt basically if you saw any woman, any female, driving a Mercedes, whether she was black, or white, or Asian, or Hispanic, or anything, it didn’t really matter, as long as she wasn’t white,” said Rana, who identifies as south Asian.

Waterloo police Deputy Chief Stephen Beckett said the incident was “not a matter of racial bias on the officer’s part but a matter of systemic problems.”

The officer issuing the ticket — which Rana ended up paying — searched her description in the Canada Police Information Centre, a national database used by police services across the country and maintained by the RCMP.

For most CPIC records, such as information on persons of interest or warrants, race is entered as either white or non-white. More detail can be included as a comment on the file.

“These fields are not intended to provide detailed information about an individual,” said RCMP spokesperson David Falls in an email.

Falls said information on a person’s race is needed to help distinguish different records when looking for the identity of a suspect or victim.

The RCMP has not received any complaints about the white or non-white fields, Falls said.

Waterloo’s local record systems have been changed to remove the white or non-white choice from the list of racial identifiers, Beckett said.

“It’s an old terminology that should have been changed a while ago, I think,” Beckett said.

Instead, Waterloo now has a lengthy list of racial identifiers, which includes the option “other” for mixed-race or other identifiers.

“We also have training that’s upcoming for our frontline officers as a result of this to make sure that we’re addressing the appropriate use of identifiers,” Beckett said.

But CPIC’s white/non-white distinction is still used by police forces across the country, including the RCMP — something Beckett said he’d like to change.

Beckett sits on the National Police Information Services Advisory Board, and said the issue would be discussed in January.

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“We acknowledge that there’s some weaknesses with the system right now, and we’re working very hard to fix it. We hope to have it resolved in the next little while,” Beckett said.

Rana said she thinks the outdated system needs to be overhauled.

“I think the fact that it exists today is really detrimental to the entire diversity and feelings of diversity that a lot of Canadians should have, and should be mirrored through the police services,” Rana said.