CHICAGO —The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office has begun classifying Latinos in its annual reports, a change in procedure insisted upon by a Cook County Commissioner and leaders of the Latino community.
Until recently, the medical examiner's office listed Latino men and women as "white," both in its daily and annual reports. That caused alarm and confusion for Commissioner Richard Boykin when he was looking at homicide statistics to help better allocate resources to prevent gun violence, he said.
"When I got the data, I was kind of alarmed," Boykin told DNAinfo Chicago.
That led Boykin and allies to launch a public campaign to get the medical examiner to modernize its race classifications. With Latinos making up about a quarter of the city's population, Boykin said it is imperative to specify those victims in death reports so anti-violence resources make it to the most needy populations.
The medical examiner last week announced that it would work to classify Latinos in its data reports, Frank Shuftan, the office's spokesman, said.
Shuftan said Latinos, unlike blacks and whites, are not specified in the reports because it is often hard to make a scientific distinction when bodies reach the medical examiner.
For starters, he said there is usually no one to speak for the deceased when the medical examiner gets a body and begins collecting data. It would be unscientific to make a determination just by looking at a person, he said.
And names are not the most accurate either, as someone could marry into a name that is traditionally Latino but not share that same heritage.
"You cant even really tell through a drivers license, for example," Shuftan said. "Rather than guess or rely on bad data, we've set the system up so that we can collect what is meaningful."
The medical examiner will then classify a body as Latino once it has received a death certificate or other data from the family or funeral home, Shuftan said.
Because it can take a while to collect such data, Shuftan said Latinos will still be classified as "white" in the daily death reports the office distributes. But the information will be made available in annual reports, he said.
Boykin said the change in race classifications will make government more transparent and help officials better address gun violence.
“Today we mark yet another milestone in achieving greater transparency and accuracy in County government," he said in a press release.
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