Researchers fight to accurately document police violence against Latinos 

Editor’s note: This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

By Roberto Camacho | Edited by Ricardo Sandoval-Palos

On a warm August night in 2017, Rosa Moreno received the most unbearable news. Her son, César Rodríguez, died in a fight with a Long Beach (California) police officer.

The fatal incident began with César’s alleged failure to pay a $1.75 train fare.

Rodríguez was riding the Long Beach - Los Angeles Metro, on his way to meet up with his girlfriend. The train was between the Willow and Wardlow stations in Long Beach when two LBPD officers began fare inspections of passengers. Rodríguez was pulled off the train at the Wardlow station after the Metro officer determined Rodríguez hadn’t paid his fare. In their report, officers said Rodríguez initially gave the officers a fake name and they decided to search his person. The officers had already decided he was a fare evader and planned to arrest him, but the pat-down resulted in a discovery: a substance that the reporting officer believed to be methamphetamine.

The officers’ report goes on to say Rodríguez tried to pull away, which they interpreted as resisting arrest; setting off a struggle on the Metro platform. One officer and Rodríguez fell to the ground and Rodríguez’s legs dangled over the tracks. He was struck by an oncoming train, dragged about eight feet, and then pinned between the train and the platform. None of the station’s cameras captured the incident, but surveillance video from the incoming train recorded a few moments of the struggle before Rodríguez was struck. Rodríguez was declared dead at Memorial Hospital two hours and three minutes later. He was 23 years old.

Moreno and her family didn’t learn about Rodríguez’s fate until several days later. Only after Rodríguez’s godmother was contacted did Moreno learn that her son had died in Wardlow Station.

The fight for data

Beyond Long Beach, few know of César Rodríguez. The case did not draw large nationwide attention. It did not spark street protests.

But it was far from abnormal, and police reform advocates took note. They added Rodríguez’s death to La Raza Database Project, a roster of Latinos who have died in violent confrontations with police. The collaborative project is led by Cal State University San Bernardino and Latino Education and Advocacy Days (LEAD), an organization within the university that addresses both educational and social issues impacting Latino communities.

La Raza database was launched with the intention of accurately documenting Latinos killed by U.S. law enforcement and it notes case after case of official and lethal violence against Latinos — most of it lightly reported by media outside the immediate communities where the deaths occurred.

The bulk of mainstream media attention on racial injustice across the nation remains trained on horrific incidents of police abuse in Black communities. For decades, criminal justice coverage involving Latinos has focused overwhelmingly on immigration. However, La Raza’s database shows Latinos are disproportionately affected by officials’ violence. Latinos are the second most likely demographic to be killed by law enforcement in the U.S. relative to their population. According to the La Raza database, at least 6,460 Latinos died in police confrontations or in police custody between 2000 and 2022. The number, researchers say, is likely to be even higher because Latinos’ ethnicity is often misclassified or undefined in police reports and official documents following fatal encounters.

To address this, La Raza Database Project takes on the frequent improper demographic categorization of Latinos affected by police violence as “unknown,” “unidentified,” or even “white.” The project’s researchers say misclassification and incomplete data contribute to undercounting, and shed light on the systematic dehumanization of Latino victims of police violence.

Dr. Roberto “Cintli” Rodríguez, an emeritus associate professor in the Mexican American Studies Department at the University of Arizona and La Raza Database Research Project Founder and Director, began this work as an attempt to document every instance of deadly use of force by police against Latinos.

Police violence affecting Latino communities is too often treated as an afterthought in a voluminous catalog of police violence, particularly in communities of color.

According to Rodríguez’s introduction to La Raza’s September 2023 report of findings, the number of those killed or who have died at the hands of, or in the presence of law enforcement, between 2000 and September 2023, is more than 35,000 people. Of those, more than 60% are people of color, Rodríguez said.

The project was Rodríguez’s brainchild — he was a survivor of police violence himself — and a passion project he maintained until his death last year, due to heart failure, in Mexico. He was 69 years old.

After working for nearly four decades as an academic advocating for police accountability and Chicano civil rights, Rodríguez partnered with demographer Jesus M. Garcia and social justice activist Ivette “Xochiyotl” Boyzo in 2020 to create the database. Previously, no entity tracking killings by law enforcement had concentrated its focus solely on documenting Latino deaths in police encounters or in custody.

The team encountered a number of barriers preventing accuracy.

Varied methodologies for collecting data (such as omitting deaths occurring in custody of immigration and other federal agencies) complicate the task of properly cataloging Latino deaths, as do inconsistencies among police and coroner reports where ethnicity is not documented properly — if at all.

The La Raza team combed through volumes of data dating back to 2000. They determined a lack of national standards for identifying race and ethnicity leads many people of color to be categorized as “white” or “other.” Such categorization decisions are often left to local police officers or coroners, and they follow protocols set by individual cities, counties, and states.

As a group, Latinos have historically been overrepresented in the unknown/unidentified category. This glaring oversight has frustrated researchers of police violence, leaving them to try to fill the gaps and shed light on complicated data sets.

However, researchers note that behind the tens of thousands of data points — and behind coroner, police, and court records – there is a human being. And behind that person are family members left to deal with devastating realities in the wake of their loved ones’ deaths.

More than statistics

One such family is the Serranos of Jurupa Valley in California’s Riverside County.

Ernie Serrano, a 33-year-old Mexican-American, was killed at a Stater Bros. market on December 15, 2020. He was buying snacks.

Riverside County sheriff’s deputies received reports of a man wandering in and out of the store. A 911 caller reported an altercation between Serrano and a security guard. Video from a bystander’s camera captured the arrest. It shows sheriff’s deputies beating an unarmed Serrano with batons and tasering him before wrestling him face down on a check-out conveyor belt. On the sheriff’s body camera video, Serrano can be heard pleading, “Let me go, please” several times between cries of pain. His face is bloodied and officers put on his face what appears to be a mesh mask that law enforcement refers to as a “spit hood”.

By minute five of the half-hour body cam video, Serrano stops talking and is no longer struggling. He is completely quiet and unmoving as officers discuss what to do with him. More than a minute more passes before an officer notices that Serrano isn’t breathing. Nearly seven minutes into the video, officers pull him off the conveyor belt and move him to the floor. One officer can be heard saying, “Pull off the mask, pull off the mask” before announcing that they are starting CPR. EMS personnel arrive and take over, conducting CPR for more than 20 minutes before Serrano is taken to a hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival. An autopsy suggested Serrano died of a methamphetamine overdose. However, attorneys for Serrano’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit, claiming he died of asphyxiation as a result of the deputies putting him in a prone restraint. Today, that challenge is making its way through the courts.

Ernie’s cousin, Natalia Serrano, a Riverside community organizer, believes his death is indicative of a broader trend of police using excessive use of force against Latinos. She says Ernie would have been treated differently by sheriff’s deputies had he been white. “I do really feel like race was a huge factor (in the way he was treated).… There are (numerous) cases of white people who the police were called on, and police had so much more patience and restraint when dealing with them. But when the police have a confrontation with someone who’s Black or Brown, they don’t care about the life of the person they’re supposed to be serving. At the end of the day the police are not supposed to go and murder; they’re supposed to serve, protect, and do what they can to de-escalate.”

Left in the dark to fill in the gaps

La Raza’s database contains thousands of cases; in many of them, researchers have grappled with the fact that Latino ethnicity is not always plainly visible, nor clearly defined. Defining racial identity among Latinos in the U.S. has proven to be challenging. Under the federal government’s current metrics, “Hispanics” can be of any race.

This ambiguity or lack of clear application of what “Hispanic” or “Latino” means has long contributed to the challenges of documenting police violence in Latino communities. Andrew Guerrero, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University who has published ​​critical perspectives on the organization and social consequences of policing, describes how ambiguities around race and immigration have led to Latinos being viewed through a one-dimensional lens that relegates them to discussions regarding immigration. “Latines are incredibly diverse: race, socioeconomic status, and geography fail to encapsulate ‘Latines’ as a category,” Guerrero said. Complicating the research, many Latinos have “European” surnames — while many last names might sound Latino but are not. As a result, many Latinos are missed in databases that use classification by name matching. In an effort to correct misclassification, La Raza’s researchers painstakingly combed through a combination of four national databases that track police killings, as well as local news reports, public records, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s 160,000 surname list file of race/ethnicity, comparing it with the surnames of all individuals cataloged.

“The team was made up of volunteers who sifted through new documents in a case that could help establish the race/ethnicity of each person, said Ivette “Xochiyotl” Boyzo, La Raza’s project manager. “When that didn’t work, we relied heavily on court dates and geography. And running the names through the Census Bureau database was also able to give us a more accurate account of which ethnic group the person belonged to.”

Database volunteers succeeded in identifying 90% of the 9,000 individuals listed in the roster who had an unknown race/ethnicity. The majority were reclassified as Latino. Researchers identified 30% more Latinos than had been identified as such previously, adjusting the initial count from 4,483 to 6,460 victims. The team was shocked to discover that after Latinos, Asian-Pacific Islander victims were the most likely demographic to be misidentified or labeled as unknown/unspecified. The number of individuals identified as Asian-Pacific Islander was four times higher than the original count, jumping from 497 to an astonishing 2,010 identified individuals.

“We expected the undercount with Latinos, but we didn’t expect the Asian and Pacific Islander community to have a 75% undercount,” Boyzo said. “It was shocking.”

Despite the team’s striving for accuracy, Boyzo noted that the database’s numbers likely still reflect an undercount, due to limits on how deeply some personal information on victims can be tracked with open-source tools.

Accountability and access to justice

Advocates believe the database will have a positive impact on families affected by police violence. For some, in the absence of accountability or resolution, the database could be evidence that someone cares about police violence affecting Latino people.

The Riverside sheriff’s deputies who arrested Ernie Serrano were never charged or held criminally liable for his death.

Nearly seven years after César Rodríguez’s death, his mother still struggles with the loss of her son. She said the toll of fighting for justice has been heavy, despite having been awarded $12.2 million in a civil judgment by the Los Angeles Superior Court in 2023. The court found that the LBPD had acted negligently during Rodríguez’s arrest and ultimately bore responsibility for his death. The ruling has been hailed as a rare victory for families of police violence and is the largest police misconduct verdict in history against the LBPD. But it may be a temporary win, as the city of Long Beach has appealed the decision.

“My son was a young man with a whole life ahead of him,” said Moreno. He wanted to finish school and go into the Navy or have a small career. But he can never do that because one police officer took his life for $1.75.”

An uncertain future

After years of collecting data, La Raza Database Project published what may be its final report in September 2023.

As of now, the future of La Raza Database Project is uncertain. “Since Dr. Rodríguez passed away (unexpectedly just a few weeks before the report was completed), it’s unclear whether we’re going to move forward and how we’ll go about that if we do,” Boyzo said. “We’re not a non-profit; this is all just volunteer work. We were lucky to have Cal State University, San Bernardino host and house the final report. But it’s unclear if we’re going to be able to continue this work.”

She’s proud that the team showed the importance of accurate data in pursuing transparency and accountability. She hopes the team’s findings will bring more attention to police violence in Latino communities.

“There’s no way there can be justice without the truth, and there cannot be truth without actual accountability,” she adds. “If we don’t have clear narratives explaining why this is happening, then there’s no way that we’re going to achieve change if our people aren’t being properly accounted for.”

Roberto Camacho is a freelance Chicano journalist from San Diego, California. He is a graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. His reporting typically focuses on criminal justice reform, immigration, Chicano/Latino issues, Hip-Hop culture, and their intersections with social justice.

Yessenia Camacho grew up in Pomona, CA and is from Mexican background. Her parents are from Jalisco, Mexico. She is a first generation college student with two Bachelors in Sociology and Chicanx Latinx Studies from UC Irvine. She is currently in a dual Masters program at UCLA for a Masters of Public Policy MPP and Masters of Social Welfare MSW. She works as a Case Manager to the unhoused population in Orange County, and is a photographer on the side.

Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is palabra’s founding editor. He is the Public Editor for PBS, an intermediary on ethics, integrity and standards between the broadcaster’s audiences and its creatives and journalists. Ricardo is an award-winning investigative reporter and editor. His reporting in Latin America earned awards from the Overseas Press Club and the InterAmerican Press Association. He’s also co-author of the biography, “The Fight In The Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement.”