More than 100 traffic stops by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper assigned to Lake Worth Beach turned up a striking pattern: over nearly a year of tickets, not a single driver was marked as Hispanic. Community groups and researchers warn that kind of hole in race and ethnicity data can make it harder to see whether traffic enforcement is falling disproportionately on Latino residents.
Records show trooper rarely recorded ‘Hispanic’
Ticket records reviewed in Palm Beach County show Trooper John Petrofsky marked 87 drivers as white, 19 as Black and one as other across 107 cases, and did not designate anyone as Hispanic, according to WLRN. In several stops cited in that reporting, motorists with surnames such as Hernandez, Martinez and Rodriguez were logged as white.
One example in the records involves Jose Wilmer Hernandez Alvarez, pulled over on Sept. 23, 2025 for dark window tint. His traffic citation and arrest report both list him as white, according to WLRN.
Advocates and experts call for a review
Local immigrant advocates and policing researchers say that kind of pattern makes independent oversight a lot tougher. Josh Parker of the NYU Policing Project told WLRN that such numbers should be a red flag, saying it should prompt supervisors at Florida Highway Patrol to review the trooper’s stops…