The San Francisco Police Department has underreported the arrest rates of the city's two largest minority groups for years, misclassifying Latino arrestees as "white" and Asian arrestees as “other"

According to the reported data, African Americans are arrested at a much higher rate than whites. But by misclassifying Latinos, the department has inflated the number of whites arrested, indicating that the gap between the arrest rates for whites and blacks is even wider. In San Francisco, African Americans make up 6% of the population but account for 40% of all arrests.