What to Know
- The Nassau County Police Department has been categorizing its staff of Asian descent with the letter 'Y,' for yellow
- The racially insensitive category was revealed in data the department provided to the NYCLU on its diversity
- The department said the categorization was due to an old system, and it would immediately stop using 'Y' to indicate Asian-American staff
A New York police department has been using 'Y' for 'yellow' to categorize its personnel of Asian descent for up to 25 years, News 4 has learned.
The practice of using 'Y' to indicate staff of Asian descent in certain documents was revealed in a spreadsheet provided to the New York Civil Liberties Union by the Nassau County Police Department.
The document was provided when the NYCLU asked the department for its data on diversity, as part of a new, searchable database on New York police departments called Behind the Badge.
In the spreadsheet, police personnel are broken up into five categories: B, H, Y, W and I. The 'I' stands for Indian, and was being used to categorize Native Americans.
“These derogatory denotations don’t only represent slurs against members of the department, they also raise questions about the way the police department thinks about Asian-Americans and the communities they are sworn to protect," NYCLU lead policy counsel Michael Sisitzky said.
Local
When asked about its categorization methods, the Nassau County Detective Lieutenant Richard LeBrun said it was due to an old computer program.
"In this particular situation, this computer program was developed over a quarter century ago and in no way has the use of these letters reflected any bias toward our Asian American or Native American residents," he said.
He added that the department would "immediately" modify the demographic labels that they use. "Asian Americans and Native Americans will be properly identified in the revisions to this IT system," he said.
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Behind the Badge launched last week and is a website featuring policies and data from more than 15,600 pages of documents gathered from seven of the largest departments across the state of New York. Information from over a dozen more departments will be added later this fall. The data is from a three year period, 2012 to 2015.
"After pouring over tens of thousands of pages, it’s clear that departments have very few rules in place to govern how police operate," the NYCLU said.
It said it also found that Rochester Police have secretly used cellphone capture devices when they didn’t have legal clearance, that White Plains police can basically turn their body cameras on or off as they like and that Suffolk police are instructed to ask people for their country of birth when stopped, a practice that targets immigrants.
