One of the state’s senior public defenders sharply criticized a state report on racial disparities in traffic stops by police Thursday, describing the study as incomplete and one that falsely gives the impression that racial profiling is not a problem in Massachusetts.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Arnie Stewart, deputy chief counsel of the public defender division at the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
Stewart testified Thursday afternoon during the third and final public hearing before the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security on a report published last month analyzing racial factors in traffic stops by law enforcement across the state.
The report produced by researchers at Salem State University and Worcester State University in early February was required under the 2019 law banning the use of cellphones and other electronic devices while driving unless used in hands-free mode.
While the study found no proof of racial profiling or racial disparities in traffic stops statewide, the data reported by State Police and local police departments did show that Black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be issued citations, searched or arrested after a stop than their white peers.
Stewart said she was concerned about how the report has been presented and perceived by the public since its release.
“This is racial disparity. Race is a factor in Massachusetts traffic stops because racism is alive and thriving,” Stewart said.
The report’s authors cautioned during the hearing and in the study itself that there were limitations to the conclusions that can be drawn from their analysis because of the data available, including the lack of reporting on stops that result in verbal warnings, or the initial reason for a stop.
“That may be true but this seems to me like a disparity worth looking into further,” Stewart said, suggesting that public safety office Secretary Terrence Reidy should use his authority to order any department with a disparity in the numbers of citations, searches and arrests of Black and Hispanic drivers to collect data on all traffic stops.
The scope of traffic stop data to be collected was a major sticking point during debates in the House and Senate over the hands-free driving bill, and the resulting compromise was criticized at the time by civil rights groups including the ACLU as “one step forward, two steps back.”
The Senate passed a bill that would have required police to note the age, gender and perceived ethnicity of every driver pulled over, regardless of the stop’s outcome. That got scaled back in negotiations with the House, and the final bill mandated reporting only for traffic stops ending in citations, with any police department found to have engaged in profiling required to record data at every stop for a year and undergo bias training.
The debate, however, has not ended.
The report analyzed citations issued by Massachusetts law enforcement agencies between Feb. 23, 2020 and Dec. 31, 2020 as reported to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. A total of 425,702 traffic stops were counted from 350 law enforcement agencies during the 10-month period.
Researchers relied on a method called “Veil of Darkness” to analyze the data, which takes into account the time of day a traffic stop occurs and assumes that police are less likely to be able to identify someone’s race when making make a stop at night.
The report found that non-white motorists were 36% less likely to be stopped in daylight than in darkness, which became the basis for the finding that “no support was shown for a pattern of racial disparity based on the VoD analysis for the state as a whole.”
“If we’re going to get real about racial profiling in Massachusetts we need to collect data on all stops, as well as collect data on the reasons for all stops,” Stewart said. “I hope that you take the report’s limitation seriously and do not mistake the lack of findings of racial profiling as false and inaccurate proof that it is not happening in our commonwealth.”
Josh Raisler Cohn, a staff attorney at the Committee for Public Counsel Services, said the “Veil of Darkness” tool is one way of looking at data, but “may fail to capture evidence of racial profiling, even when the evidence exists.” He noted research done in 2006 in Oakland, California that failed to find evidence of racial profiling using that same method, only to be contradicted when another team of researchers looked at data from stops when police could identify race before the stop was made.
Cohn said the lack of data on all traffic stops, not just those that result in a citation or arrest, fails to capture thousands of stops that end with a verbal warning or drivers just being allowed to leave. He said specifically in Boston that members of the Police Department’s Youth Violence Strike Force, or gang unit, have testified in court to pulling over 1,000 to 2,000 cars a year, but writing only 20 citations or warnings.
Many of these stops involve Black and brown drivers, Cohn said.
“Including this data would dramatically impact the evidence of racial profiling in stops in Boston, and for the statewide numbers,” Cohn said.