What do you do when the justice system sabotages justice?
How many “white” guys do you know with the name Santiago Xopop? What about Angel Aguinaga Mendoza? Eduardo Hernando Solis? None? Me neither. They all sound very much Hispanic…because they are. All it takes to determine this is to…have eyeballs.
I discovered these individuals when I looked up the inmate roster at my local jail—but the strange thing is, they’re all identified in the public record as being of the “white” race. Yet, they all look like they’re right out of Juárez, Quito, or Guatemala City. And, after scanning through roughly 40 pages of inmates, I found that nearly every single Hispanic person was listed as “White,” with the exception of just a few, whom were listed as “Unknown” or “Not specified.”
I found 20 instances (before I had to get back to actual work), which can be found by clicking on the above tweet and scrolling down.
Now, I made a call to the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office (the institution that runs that jail), and spoke to a man there who gave me this explanation: the FBI’s NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System) only has five classifications for determining race, which are “White,” “Black or African American,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” Which is very inadequate, clearly.
All those racial Arab criminals? They’re “Asian.” Sure, Afghanistan is in central Asia, but who would consider an Afghan someone of the Asian race? What about someone from Pakistan, like all those grooming rapists in the U.K.? Again, racially, they’d be Arabs—not Asians—because race isn’t determined by geography.
The Brazilian native and illegal alien Fleury Jobenson, who’s charged with a sex offense for the alleged “Electronic Solicitation of a Child” in my town? He’s “Black or African American.” I suppose it’s technically accurate if you’re combining the racial group of blacks with the colloquial term “African American,” but it’s very inaccurate and very dishonest.
They’re afraid not to.
Our stats would look too good. We get blamed for everything else, why not someone else’s crime?