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Latino drivers are 'erased' from traffic records, according to investigation

2021-11-23T04:41:30.333Z


ProPublica revealed that in Louisiana, agents stop Hispanic drivers and describe them as white to hide the racial prejudice behind their stops.


Louisiana law enforcement officers have been charged with targeting primarily Hispanic drivers, failing to collect data when stopped in traffic, covering up possible officer misconduct, and aggressive immigration enforcement in identifying individuals. as targets on traffic tickets, according to new research by ProPublica, in conjunction with radio stations WRKF and WWNO.

This has happened particularly in the Jefferson parish, where until 2020 Hispanics constituted 18% of the population of the place, which has more than 440,000 inhabitants.

Octavio Lopez, for example, was arrested in 2018 for an expired license plate and

was described as 'white' in his traffic ticket

.

Lopez is from Nicaragua, is Hispanic and only speaks Spanish, according to his wife.

Of the 167 tickets issued by officers to drivers with the last name Lopez, over a period of nearly six years,

none of the drivers were labeled Hispanic

, according to records provided by the Jefferson parish clerk of court.

Hispanic drivers are described as white in traffic tickets.Getty Images

According to ProPublica, the same happened with the 252 fines issued to people with the surname Rodriguez, 234 with the surname Martinez, 223 with the surname Hernandez and 189 with the surname Garcia.

"If everyone is white, then there can't be any racial bias," Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told ProPublica.

Although Louisiana has had its own data collection requirement for two decades, it has a different legal loophole than other states: It exempts agents from collecting and releasing data to the state if they have a policy against racial profiling.

Jefferson Parish, as ProPublica explains,

was chosen for the investigation because it has the largest Hispanic population in the state

, and because the Sheriff's office has been consistently accused by local residents and activists of harassing Hispanic people.

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The data showed that of the nearly 80,000 tickets that the Louisiana State Police handed out in Jefferson over nearly six years, not a single one was issued to a person labeled Hispanic.

"The distinction between white and black is usually well recorded, but that of Hispanics is not. Many Hispanics are misclassified as white," Baumgartner said.

Seven racial profiling experts who reviewed the research data said

this level of misidentification is almost unmatched across the country

.

[This Latino Uber driver achieves his dream of traveling 48 states in several weeks]

This misidentification also occurs because the agent is the one who determines the race or ethnic origin of a person and writes it by hand on the summons ticket.

The Jefferson Sheriff's Office did not respond to ProPublica's questions as to whether officers are trained to exclude the category 'Hispanic' when determining someone's race.

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Critics of this practice, however, claim that agents may do this on purpose to

hide that they are racially profiling people.

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2021-11-23

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