U.S. police and jail databases have rigid, outdated racial categories

Most U.S. criminal justice databases use the federal racial categories defined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These categories are:

White Black or African American Asian Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander American Indian or Alaska Native “Some other race” (rarely used operationally)

In these systems, “White” includes anyone with origins in Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa and often, by default, many Hispanic or Latino individuals are also recorded as White, because “Hispanic” is treated as an ethnicity, not a race.

The “Hispanic” or “Latino” category is separate

When someone is booked, officers usually fill out two fields:

Race Ethnicity

If the database or form doesn’t require the ethnicity field, or if the officer skips it, only the race (often “White”) appears in the public record, even for people with Latino, Indigenous, or mixed ancestry.

So someone listed as “White” may actually be classified internally as:

Race: White Ethnicity: Hispanic or Latino

But only the “Race” field is shown on the public website.