Texas state troopers wrongly recorded the race of minority drivers in what might be seen as an effort to disguise racial profiling, the investigative team of Austin's NBC affiliate reported based on expert testimony.

Officers from the state's Department of Public Safety (DPS) frequently recorded the race of Hispanic motorists as "white," thus skewing profiling statistics, KXAN explained. By law, troopers are required to state a driver's "race or ethnicity, as stated by the person or, if the person does not state the person's race or ethnicity, as determined by the officer to the best of the officer's ability."

But the station points to individuals such as Sergio Raul Mejia, who last May was ticketed for having his license plate on the dash of his truck in Georgetown, Texas, and whose race was logged as "white" by the Texas DPS officer who had pulled him over.

"That's bad," Mejia said about the incident in what KXAN called "broken English." "I'm Hispanic; he was not supposed to put white people," he added, explaining that he believed he looked Latino.

The requirement for officers to accurately list the race of motorists issued as little as a warning or citation was introduced as a preventative measure against racial profiling, and "white" and "Hispanic" are listed as two separate categories on official forms, the Christian Science Monitor noted.

Alex del Carmen, executive director of the School of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Strategic Studies at Tarleton State University in Fort Worth, told the newspaper that it was critical that troopers do not intentionally misreport such data.

"This is the only manner in which we can ensure an accurate representation of motor vehicle stops and trends," del Carmen explained.

Ranjana Natarajan, the director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, told KXAN that he doubted that the wrong reports were just coincidental.

"I think there could be accidents every now and then, but the sheer number of the reports that you found, where it looks like the people who are not white are being classified as white, means that there is something else going on here," Natarajan insisted.

DPS Director Steven McCraw, meanwhile, told the NBC affiliate that the investigative team's point "may be valid" but added that troopers have been trained to accurately determine and report the race of each driver.