The San Francisco Police Department has underreported the arrest rates of the city's two largest minority groups for years, classifying Latino arrestees as "white" and Asian American suspects as "other," according to agency records and police officials.

The state has been publishing the erroneous statistics in a report tracking arrests by race and ethnicity since at least 1999, when the California Department of Justice began posting the data online, a Bay Citizen investigation found.

Because of the way the Police Department classifies suspects, the city and federal and state officials have no accurate record of how often Latinos and Asian Americans are arrested in San Francisco. The Police Department blames an antiquated computer system, which officials say offers no alternative to listing an arrestee as "black," "white" or "other."

Over the years, concerns about racial profiling in the city's African American and Latino communities have led to city hearings and policy changes. In 1999, the Police Commission ordered the Police Department to begin tracking racial data from all traffic stops.

"This is just extremely troubling," Francisco Ugarte, senior immigration attorney at the San Francisco Immigrant Legal and Education Network, said of the classification of Latinos as "white" and Asians as "other." "If San Francisco is effectively unable to categorize those in the city being arrested, that would undermine our ability to monitor police practices - particularly in San Francisco, with such a huge Latino population."

The Bay Citizen discovered the discrepancies after the California Department of Justice released the crime statistics for 2010 in June.

According to the agency's "Crime in California" report, 8,198 African American adults and 9,151 white adults were arrested in San Francisco in 2010, along with 316 Hispanic adults. A total of 2,789 adult arrestees were listed under "other."

The Hispanic arrest figures included in the report come from other agencies in San Francisco, such as the California Highway Patrol, that have the authority to make arrests in the city but don't share the Police Department's outdated computer system.

Admittedly wrong

San Francisco police commanders acknowledge that some of the department's statistics are incorrect.

"We have certainly made more than 300 arrests in the Hispanic community," said Deputy Chief Lyn Tomioka.

Police officers mark whether an individual is Latino or Asian on arrest reports, but Tomioka and other department officials blamed their computer system for the inaccuracies.

Installed in 1972, the system lists three categories for identifying arrestees by race: black, white and other. Although the department could calculate the numbers manually, officers have been identifying Latinos as white and Asians as other in the computer system for years.

"It's what the system has available to the officers to put in," Tomioka said.

The Police Department has no idea if any of the statistics it reports to the state are accurate, said Susan Giffin, the department's chief technology officer.

"Not only can we not tell you if the numbers are right, we really can't articulate what the problems are, or if there are problems," Giffin said.

State law

By law, the Police Department is required to report crime and arrest statistics to the state Department of Justice each month. The state attorney general's office and the FBI publish the data in their annual crime reports. The statistics also have been used in studies on racial disparities and trends in arrest rates.

Although the state's published reports do not list Asian Americans as a separate category, California does require counties to list Asian arrestees.

Asked whether the Department of Justice expects law enforcement agencies to report accurate information to the state attorney general's office, agency spokesman Nicholas Pacilio had no comment.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

San Francisco civil rights advocates said they were stunned that police weren't classifying Latino and Asian American suspects precisely.

An issue of trust

"I had no idea," said Lorena Melgarejo, director of community organizing at the Central American Resource Center. "The Police Department says the community's trust is very important to them. If they are underreporting numbers, they are basically making it impossible for us to understand what is really happening."

Angela Chan, a member of the San Francisco Police Commission and an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said, "The fact that our technology is outdated is the reason for a lot of things. If there's an issue, it needs to be solved."

The problem is just one of many related to the Police Department's outdated technology. The city controller's office concluded in January that the department's public and internal crime reports frequently conflicted with the reports that police send to the FBI because of "disparate data sources."

The controller's office is reviewing the department's technology issues at the request of Police Chief Greg Suhr.