Atherton, CA's police blotter: 175 out of 182 reported police stops had drivers with Hispanic surnames

Kent Brewster made some careful notes and analysis of the Atherton, CA police-blotter, which tells the story of the arrests in one of America's three most expensive places to live. He found that when it came to traffic stops, 175 out of 182 drivers had Hispanic surnames.

Atherton, California is consistently one of the USA's top three most expensive places to live, and is (moderately) famous for its police blotter, which features an ongoing parade of first world problems.

While it's fun to giggle at all those suspicious circumstances, mysterious disturbances, construction complaints, parking hassles, and miscellaneous town ordinance violations, the data takes a sobering turn when we examine vehicle code violations from February through July of 2013.

Important node: I have in no way, shape or form "hacked" Atherton or its police department to produce this site. Every bit of it was gathered from public records put out by the Atherton PD. All posts from the Atherton police WordPress blog were carefully massaged into one large JSON object. Incident categories and dispositions have been normalized where possible; corrections or properly-sourced additions will be gratefully accepted.

Profiling Atherton