After lengthy delay, Mass. State Police release data about complaints and use of force
Data about thousands of incidents involving the State Police are now available to the public
As you’re about to find out, it took a long time and a lot of work to get these important records. If you want to see more work like this, please consider supporting my work financially, either by signing up for a paid subscription to this newsletter or sending me a tip via PayPal. I really can’t do this without your help.
It took almost a year, but the Massachusetts State Police have released two spreadsheets containing information about thousands of use-of-force incidents and internal affairs investigations.
The Mass Dump is publishing this information for anyone to review:
You can download the internal affairs spreadsheet here (Excel format) or view the data using a searchable database on the Mass Dump website
You can download the use-of-force spreadsheet here (Excel format) or view the data using a searchable database on the Mass Dump website
All police departments in Massachusetts, including the State Police, were required to submit data about complaints to the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission in 2022. The POST Commission is required by law to build a database of complaints against all police officers in the state but has delayed publishing the data and has not said when it will do so.
The spreadsheet provided by the State Police only contains information about active officers. The spreadsheet was last updated on April 9, 2022, and has more than 3,600 entries with information about complaints dating back to 1983. There is also one blank entry for each officer, whether or not that officer has any complaints.
The State Police maintain use-of-force data using IAPro, a popular piece of software among police departments. The spreadsheet provided by the State Police is current as of January 2023 and has nearly 6,000 entries dating back to 2009.
The Mass Dump requested the use-of-force data on March 29, 2022, and the internal affairs data on April 20, 2022. State law requires all state agencies to respond to public records requests in writing within 10 business days and provide records within 15 business days.
However, the commonwealth’s largest law-enforcement agency acted as though it was above the law for 11 months.
When the Mass Dump first submitted the requests, the State Police simply ignored them. In both cases, the Mass Dump filed an appeal with the Public Records Division of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office shortly after the State Police failed to respond within 10 business days.
Rebecca Murray, who was the state’s supervisor of public records at the time, ordered the State Police to comply with both requests, but the department blew off the supervisor too. Eventually, Angela Puccini, the Public Records Division’s compliance supervisor, contacted the department to ask if it intended to comply with the law.
The State Police continued to ignore the request for the internal affairs records, but the department provided the use-of-force information on June 8. However, instead of providing the information as an Excel spreadsheet as the Mass Dump’s request specified, the State Police provided a PDF that did not have searchable text, making it nearly impossible to analyze the data. The State Police provided a searchable version of the PDF on June 13 but refused to provide the information in a spreadsheet.
“It is the department’s position that the production of an Excel spreadsheet would require the department to create a new record which it is not obligated to do under the Massachusetts public records law,” said Joshua Reilly, a State Police attorney.
However, the law says that agencies must “provide the public record in the requestor’s preferred format.” Exporting data from a computer program as an Excel spreadsheet is not considered creating a new record under the law.
On July 1, the supervisor of public records again ordered the State Police to follow the law. But the Sate Police ignored this order too, forcing Puccini to continue contacting the department.
It wasn’t until February 17 that the department finally provided the two spreadsheets.
“The Massachusetts State Police is a habitual offender — verging on a career criminal — when it comes to breaking [the public records law],” the Telegram & Gazette once reported. “The agency often fails to respond to public records requests within 10 days as required by law and sometimes takes months to respond, and then only after repeated prodding by [the supervisor of public records]. … In some cases, state police lawyers simply blew off inquiries from the supervisor of records just as they had those from the person requesting the records.”
That story was from March 2013 — a decade ago.
Things clearly haven’t changed since then. A CommonWealth magazine article that examined public records appeals found that the State Police continue to be responsible for a sizable number: “The State Police lost 178 of the 181 public records appeals filed against it in 2019, 124, or 68 percent, of them pertaining to the department’s failure to respond to the requests.”
The State Police have racked up a huge number of appeals every year since: There were 170 in 2020, 209 in 2021, and 171 in 2022. So far this year, the department has already faced another 28.
With an annual budget in the hundreds of millions, the State Police can buy all the tasers they want and take home lavish overtime with little oversight. Failing to respond to public records requests can’t be blamed on a lack of resources. It’s a deliberate decision made by State Police leaders. They know they won’t face any consequences for breaking the public records law, so they do it over and over again.
The State Police are addicted to scandal: state cops committing overtime fraud then making a mockery of the concept of restitution by repaying the stolen money with their ill-gotten pensions, officials hiding exculpatory evidence from drunk-driving defendants, a union leader convicted of federal corruption charges, etc, etc.
The fact that this cartoonishly corrupt insitution will delay releasing basic information about complaints and the use of force for nearly a year should trouble everyone. It’s proof that the commonwealth needs a much stronger public records law. It shouldn’t take a year for someone to attach of couple of spreadsheets to an email and hit send.
Among other changes, the supervisor of public records needs the power to issue huge fines that increase the longer an agency like the State Police refuses to comply with the law. Until we have reforms like that, government officials will continue to break the law, and journalists and other members of the public will need to waste hours and hours of their time just to get basic information that they are entitled to receive.
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