If news audiences have little contact with young people, they are likely to believe that youth are dangerous threats, in part because there are so few other representations of youth in the news to the contrary. The Houston Police Department initiated a data collection program in August 1999. Some officers say they simply don't fill out the computerized form. The error rate in the 'race' box is at least 19 percent. Officers can choose among 'w' for white, 'b' for black, 'h' for Hispanic, 'a' for Asian and 'n' for Native American, but thousands of records contain blanks and typos.
Officials seem unsure whether they can determine which officers made which stops.
Groups backing the bill included some law enforcement officers and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund . It's simply wrong, improper and unfair. The legislation may run into funding trouble. It calls for law enforcement agencies to gather uniform and accessible data on the race or ethnicity of individuals stopped and whether they were searched. BJS cautions that the results of this survey cannot be used to establish whether racial profiling exists, because of limitations on the data.