Why the fight to curb racial profiling via traffic stop data keeps failing in Mass.

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Eight years ago, Christopher Jackson sat in front of lawmakers at the Massachusetts Statehouse, clutching his written testimony in a shaking hand.

“Where I live, there is a great deal of racial profiling,” said Jackson, a South Shore resident, indignation in his voice. “And it has to stop.”

Jackson, who is Black, was one of several people imploring lawmakers to pass legislation in 2015 requiring police to collect demographic data on every driver they pull over — including those given verbal warnings, which are excluded from data collection.

The state needed to collect that information — which studies have repeatedly shown exhibits wider disparities than ticketed stops alone — so that data, rather than anecdotes, could drive the discussion about profiling, those testifying said.

The legislation failed, as it has through 10 legislative sessions since 1999. As a result, today roughly half of the state’s traffic stops still go largely undocumented and unscrutinized for racial disparities.

“We coast on our reputation as a progressive state so often, and it's particularly evident on issues of racial justice,” said former state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, D-Boston, one of many lawmakers who’ve tried to get the data collected for years.

A USA TODAY Network investigation by the Cape Cod Times, Worcester Telegram & Gazette and USA TODAY involving dozens of interviews, more than 50 public records requests and analysis of millions of traffic citations issued by Massachusetts police found that legislative leaders have done little over the past two decades to address potential bias in traffic stops, the most common interaction between police and the public.

The review shows that Beacon Hill’s overwhelmingly Democratic leaders — often amid pressure campaigns from police — have repeatedly rejected all-stops proposals from lawmakers of color.

As a result, the race and ethnicity of drivers let go with verbal warnings — which Massachusetts police estimate happens in four out of 10 stops — go unrecorded, a gaping data hole that advocates say makes it easier for racial profiling and unconstitutional policing to go undetected.

“Massachusetts is deficient relative to states like California,” Josh Parker, senior counsel at New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, told the USA TODAY Network. “There are a number of essential data points to determine the efficacy of traffic stops (that) Massachusetts just isn’t collecting.”

What data does exist raises questions. The news organizations’ review of about 5 million citations issued by officers from 2014 to 2022 found significant disparities at half of the 305 local police departments that issued enough tickets for analysis.

The findings indicate that Massachusetts has inequities on its roads that warrant further investigation, experts who study traffic stop disparities said. They also noted the analysis was severely limited by the incomplete data.

Those limitations make it impossible to provide full context for a trend the news organizations uncovered, where police are marking drivers with Hispanic surnames as white — a practice that was particularly pronounced in some communities.

The lack of demographic data on all traffic stops was a problem flagged nearly 20 years ago in a study of citation disparities funded by Massachusetts taxpayers.

Around the same time, the nonprofit Commission on the Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies also recommended collecting data on all stops to monitor for patterns of bias. Fifteen states, including Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, now require police to document all stops.

In Connecticut, $3.4 million in federal funding has paid for a program dedicated to addressing racial disparities in traffic enforcement since 2016. Proponents, including the Council of State Governments, laud the program for reducing disparities while improving police effectiveness and efficiency.

But Massachusetts isn’t eligible for federal funding because the grant requires data be collected for all stops.

None of the state’s most powerful legislators agreed to interviews to explain their thinking.

Critics say the Massachusetts Legislature is among the least transparent in the nation, partly because the house speaker and senate president exert enormous control over a lawmaking process that largely happens behind closed doors.

State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, a former lawmaker, proposed an investigation of the Legislature, which has seen fewer competitive races than any other state for four elections running. Attorney General Andrea Campbell ruled on Nov. 3 that DiZoglio lacked the legal authority to audit the Legislature.

DiZoglio continues to collect signatures for a proposed ballot measure that would allow an audit to go forward.

The Legislature’s opacity, Beacon Hill experts and former lawmakers said, is fertile ground for special interests, including police, to influence legislation.

“I won’t mince words,” Chang-Diaz said. “I think this is a case study in how strong the police lobby is in our Statehouse, and then also, I think it’s a case study in how the modus operandi of the police lobby is to wield power in the shadows of the legislative process.”

U.S. Marshal for Massachusetts Brian Kyes — a former Chelsea police chief — said it can be easier to have candid discussions about legislation behind closed doors. Kyes also served as legislative committee chairman for the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association and president of the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police Association.

“If we're really trying to resolve something, I don't think that we should necessarily do it in the lobby out there,” Kyes said during an interview, nodding toward the lobby of Boston’s Moakley Federal Courthouse.

‘This is not Jim Crow we are living in’

After more than three decades in the Massachusetts Legislature, Byron Rushing had ascended to assistant majority leader, the highest-ranking position ever held by a Black member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Then, in 2018, he lost reelection.

Rushing links the loss to media criticism of his final stalemate with police over his “all-stops” legislation.

Rushing filed those proposals over and over – in 1999, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017.

He made them on behalf of people like Terrence Maxey, a Black resident who told the USA TODAY Network that he’s been stopped by law enforcement more than a dozen times in Massachusetts, but only got one ticket.

Black residents have testified in favor of “all-stops” bills filed by Rushing and others at Statehouse hearings for two decades.

In 2015, Jackson recounted stops he had no doubt were profiling, including one instance when police arrested him while he was changing a tire.

“This is the 21st century. This is not Jim Crow we are living in,” Jackson told lawmakers. “We are all human beings, regardless of the pigmentation of our skin.”

Rushing’s 2015 “all-stops” proposal never even made it to a vote.

In the next session, Rushing tied the issue to a popular bill to ban the handheld use of cellphones while driving, arguing that the ban could lead to more stops with more opportunities for profiling.

In endorsing one of Rushing’s competitors, the Boston Globe called it “a principled stand” but asked, “why should two good policies be pitted against each other?”

The effort failed and later that year Rushing’s historic 35-year legislative career came to an end.

‘Cooked up entirely behind closed doors’

Less than a year after Rushing’s loss, the Legislature passed two competing versions of a bill that banned handheld cellphone use while driving.

The Senate version retained his initiative requiring police to collect data on all stops. The House version did not.

Neither body held substantive public debate about the bills. Emails and public records raise questions that lawmakers declined to answer.

Rep. Chynah Tyler, D-Boston, proposed an all-stops amendment to the House bill, but she appears to have withdrawn the amendment for a reason not listed in the Legislature’s records. Repeated attempts to interview Tyler, the only state representative to vote against the bill’s final language, were unsuccessful.

Former state Rep. Jonathan Hecht, D-Watertown, who served in the Legislature at the time, said state representatives were asked to consider a bill that was released from the Ways and Means Committee about two hours before a deadline for any amendments and the same day as the vote.

The House language was “cooked up entirely behind closed doors,” he said, and then brought to a vote with minimal time for rank-and-file representatives to stake out positions.

On June 10, 2019, the Senate unanimously passed a version of the distracted driving bill that called for detailed data collection — the officer’s badge number, the reason for the stop and the reason for and results of any search — on all traffic stops.

In sharp contrast to the House bill, which would have made records of ticketed stops secret and subject to destruction after three years, the Senate bill required police to submit data on all traffic stops annually for public release.

The Senate approved the bill in a 40-0 vote after state Sen. Michael Moore, D-Millbury, agreed to withdraw an amendment that would have stripped its traffic stop data collection requirements and instead established a commission of mostly law enforcement to investigate the feasibility of collecting and analyzing that data.

It was the same proposal made the year before by police association leaders opposed to Rushing’s “all-stops” legislation.

Moore told colleagues that because Senate leadership agreed to a request from the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association to weigh in during final negotiations on the bill, he would join the unanimous vote requiring all-stop data collection.

“I want to thank the Senate leadership for allowing the law enforcement community to be part of the resolution,” said Moore, a former environmental police officer.

The House bill, reflecting the police preference against all stops, ultimately prevailed. Moore told the USA TODAY Network that he did not know why.

He nonetheless defended the idea of closed-door negotiations on a bill’s final language, saying the kinds of frank discussions often needed on controversial topics would be hindered if the process were public.

Police lobbied against ‘all stops’

When the Massachusetts House and Senate disagree on a bill, leadership appoints a conference committee composed of three members from each chamber to negotiate and write a compromise version.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate must vote for or against the bill that comes out of that committee.

The committee appointed to negotiate the anti-profiling provisions in the 2019 bills didn’t include a single member of the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus. It did include a former state police sergeant.

The year after Rushing lost reelection, there were no Black or Latino lawmakers in legislative leadership, and 72 out of 76 committee chairmanships were held by white lawmakers.

After the Senate voted to collect data on all traffic stops, lawmakers were flooded with phone calls and emails from law enforcement arguing against the proposal, records and interviews show. The pressure campaign was largely led by police chief association officials.

On Aug. 1, 2019, Kyes, the former president of Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police Association, emailed dozens of law enforcement from across Massachusetts, ranging from local police chiefs to federal Drug Enforcement Administration personnel to state prosecutors, about the conference committee negotiations.

Copied on the email was Thomas Turco, secretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. His agency, which oversees Massachusetts law enforcement, supported stripping out the all-stops data requirement, according to a memo obtained by the USA TODAY Network.

In the email to law enforcement, Kyes wrote that then-state Rep. Timothy Whelan, a Brewster Republican and the retired state police sergeant on the conference committee, went directly to former Speaker Robert DeLeo to advocate against the Senate’s proposal.

Whelan did not return multiple voicemails requesting comment.

Urged by association leaders, police chiefs across the state also told their lawmakers to weaken the data collection requirements, emails obtained by the news organizations show.

On Sept. 7, Provincetown Police Chief James Golden sent an email to state Sen. Julian Cyr, D-Truro, who serves in Senate leadership, criticizing “the large Boston legislative contingent” for holding the distracted driving bill “hostage” over racial profiling concerns.

“I fear that Police Officers will once again avoid proactive policing efforts, and avoid altogether the responsibility of traffic education or enforcement for fear of being labeled,” Golden wrote.

In late November 2019, the bill emerged from the conference committee. It required departments to only collect data on all stops if they were first flagged by the public safety secretary — a role held by Turco and later his successor, Terrence Reidy — for "racial profiling." The decision about when and where to require that, the law said, would be made in consultation with then-Attorney General Maura Healey.

The House and Senate voted to pass the compromise. Since then, just three law enforcement agencies have been "encouraged," and voluntarily agreed, to collect data on all stops, according to a state public safety spokesperson.

Chang-Diaz told USA TODAY Network reporters that the Senate’s unanimous public vote to require police to collect data on all traffic stops reflected the will of Massachusetts voters.

The bill that came out of the conference committee that November, she said, reflected the will of Massachusetts police.

“When that debate happened in the full light of day, the bipartisan support was there. It was unanimous,” Chang-Diaz said. “And it's only when things go into the behind-the-scenes stages in conference committee where you see that the police lobby is really able to wield its full power.”

Mark K. Leahy, executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, disagreed with that assessment of law enforcement power on Beacon Hill, noting that the state’s top lawmakers haven’t approved multiple recent bills police have supported.

“Where’s the political courage?”

Questions about why bills fail or succeed in Massachusetts can be nearly impossible for the public to answer because of the Legislature’s unique opacity, according to Hecht, the former state representative.

Because most substantive debate about legislation happens behind closed doors, he and others said, the house speaker and senate president, and their leadership teams, have the freedom to negotiate without having to publicly stake out policy positions.

Hecht likened the dynamic to a game of “three-dimensional chess” that only Beacon Hill’s most powerful can play.

The speaker and president maintain control over rank-and-file members by doling out — or withholding — influence, perks like offices and parking spots, and even money in the form of stipends for leadership appointments, Hecht and other Massachusetts politics experts said.

Neither of the politicians in those posts in 2019 — Senate President Karen Spilka and former House Speaker DeLeo — agreed to interview requests for this story.

Spilka’s office provided a statement, which read in part: “As with any law recently passed, we will certainly work with our partners in government and stakeholders in monitoring its implementation to ensure the law meets the ideals of the legislature.”

Lawmakers who were willing to speak said questions about the 2019 bill would need to be answered by Spilka and DeLeo, or the conference committee chairmen they appointed, neither of whom agreed to interviews either.

Despite passing a slate of reforms unpopular with police in 2020 following George Floyd’s killing, state lawmakers have yet to reconsider collecting information on all stops.

Edward Flynn, who served as the state’s public safety secretary under Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, said the state’s 20-year failure to collect detailed traffic stop data is ultimately on lawmakers.

“The police chiefs theoretically shouldn't have a veto over criminal justice legislation,” he said. “They should be heard, but they shouldn't necessarily be able to veto it. What I'm saying is, where's the political courage here?”

Jeannette Hinkle is a Cape Cod Times staff writer, Brad Petrishen is a Worcester Telegram & Gazette staff writer and data reporters Dan Keemahill and Dian Zhang did the analysis for USA TODAY.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Mass. legislators repeatedly reject anti-racial profiling bills