How Many North Carolina White Prisoners Are Actually Black?
It is startling to see that only white people are committing crimes in North Carolina. Oh, wait… Matt Von Swol has a video up on X that lists arrest records of black men designated as white.
People think it’s happening, but it still goes on.
Reportedly, misclassification of a person’s race during an arrest in North Carolina—such as reporting a Black individual as white—typically stems from manual data-entry errors, administrative oversights, or limitations in reporting systems rather than a formal state policy.
Record-keeping systems in some law enforcement agencies have historically misclassified non-white or Hispanic individuals as White due to binary or limited race and ethnicity data options.
Many older booking or ticketing systems only allow choices like “Black” or “White,” leaving no clear category for Hispanic or multiracial individuals. So, they’re all listed as white, then? Apparently, yes.
When specific ethnicity tracking is missing, individuals who are not Black are often labeled as White in the database. It’s the default.
This mislabeling can artificially inflate White arrest and prison numbers while masking true demographic patterns.
