This week, I’ve been working on a graphic about the number of folks who resist arrests in Columbia and the disparity between each race. This story is set to run Wednesday, so I’ll post the graphic when it runs, but I learned something this week that I found rather disappointing. The Columbia Police Department keeps three racial categories to classify people they arrest: Asian, black and white. Everyone who gets arrested better be able to identify with one of those categories.

I find these categories odd for a few reasons. Where does someone who is from Pakistan fit in? They’re technically Asian, but is the category meant to lump folks from Eastern Asia with those closer to the Middle East?

When I started working on this graphic, I decided to use census data to show the racial breakdown in Columbia in 200 and in 2006 to 2008, to compare next to the arrest numbers. I felt very strange lumping together all of the minority categories not named Asian or black/African-American into the white category. However, to accurately describe the data next to the CPD’s numbers, that’s what I had to do. What do you all think of this dilemma? Am I adding to the problem by lumping these categories together, or am I accurately displaying the data?