San Francisco Police Department Falsified Racial Statistics For Arrests, Report Finds

17.8.12

San Francisco Police Department Falsified Racial Statistics For Arrests, Report Finds: [HuffPo] San Francisco's police department has been underreporting the number of Latinos and Asian Americans who have been arrested for more than a decade by classifying them as members of other ethnic groups, according to the San Francisco Bay Citizen.

The city's police counted many Latinos that had been arrested as "white" and many of the Asian-Americans arrestees as "other," junking up the official stats. The city has been long criticized for racially profiling blacks, and the fake numbers make it appear that the disparity in arrest rates between blacks and whites less stark. The report said that while only six percent of the city's population was black, African Americans make up 40 percent of all arrests there.

Police officials blamed the misclassification on a decades-old computers system only allows officers to categorize people who arrested as black, white or other.