We scraped 5.5 million criminal records and 1.5 million mugshots from 39 states.
29% of Hispanics are being misclassified as White in official Department of Corrections databases.
Even when Hispanic is explicitly classified 🧵
Everyone's seen these collages claiming non-whites get classified as White in criminal databases.
The problem? Anecdotal. Cherry-picked. No way to verify.
We had 1.5 million mugshots, names, and official racial classifications.
Time to test it systematically:
We trained a multinomial logistic regression on 18 features:
• DeepFace racial probabilities from mugshots
• Census name demographics
• First and last name racial statistics
92.76% accuracy distinguishing Black, White and Hispanic.