Monday, September 25, 2006

Missing

To my fellow dispatchers: We were looking for the race code for middle easterners, and were really surprised not to find one. The closest we came was 'other', but maybe our book is just outdated. Anyone able to find one? If not, what does that say about us? Did NCIC think we would never need to use it?

3 comments:

John Bailey said...

Is this for an NCIC entry or just an inquiry?
For inquiries we just use UNKNOWN.
Not sure for an entry.

Anonymous said...

The federal Office of Civil Rights tracks just 7 ethnicity codes - American Indian, Asian, Black, Filipino, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and White.

Anyway I googled ISO (Internation Standards) and Ethnicity and got a hit at National Cancer Institute Data Standards referencing the Centers of Disease Control (CDC).

They class Middle Eastern as R5 (White) but break down by R5.01 European, R5.02 Middle Eastern (including Irani, Iraqi, Israeli, Afghani), and R5.03 Arab.

Just don't confuse 'white and wearing a turban' (R5.02.004 Iraqi) with 'asian and wearing a turban' (R2.01 Sikh) as it annoys the Sikhs :) "C'mon man, the R numbers aren't even close."

be good

Anonymous said...

There is something you can configure (I think Kedg and Jailgy have this) so that Other/Anonymous entries require a manual check (it displays letters/numbers as a picture and prompts the poster to type it in).

This prevents automated spam blogs like the above entry, but still permits anonymous postings for those of us without blogging ids.

be good