Texas cops racially profiled drivers and lied about it
Rss@dailykos.com (josie Duffy) · Saturday, May 07, 2016, 10:26 pm
A local journalist in Texas recently discovered widespread racist policing across the state.
KXAN investigative reporter Brian Collister discovered that state law enforcement regularly issued traffic citations to Latino drivers before recording them as white in official state documentation. From Poynter:
The investigation, titled "Racial Profiling Whitewash," began in the aftermath of the Sandra Bland case, in which a Black woman was pulled over for a routine traffic stop that ended in a violent confrontation. She was arrested, and police found her hanged to death in her jail cell three days later.
The next month, state officials released a trove of documents that appeared to show the arresting officer in the Bland case stopped the same proportion of African American and White drivers.
KXAN looked into the documents and also began sorting through data on the 16 million traffic citations issued last year through the Texas Department of Public Safety. Something wasn't adding up—Collister noticed that "four of the top five names listed as White on Texas traffic citations sound Hispanic or Latino." From Poynter:
"We just did a truth test," Collister told Poynter. "We started with a five-year dataset with 16 million citations. The first thing we did was — sorted the last name column A-Z. We went to Gonzalez, Mendoza, Garcia, and we saw they all were showing up as White.
"http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/EAYnJLbuqxI/-Texas-cops-racially-profiled-drivers-and-lied-about-it
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