MA Precinct-Level Election Returns

What's in this dataset?

Precinct-level election returns for the 11/2/2010 and 11/8/2016 elections in Massachusetts. The data include information about county, district, municipality, ward number, precinct number, office name, candidate name, political party, votes, ballot count, write-in votes, ballot order, and candidate district. The 2010 returns also include candidate address.

These data were received from the MA Secretary of State Elections Division on 5/10/2022. Both datasets were renamed. The 2010 election returns were originally received in a pipe “|” delimited txt format and have been reformatted as a csv file. No other changes were made to the data.

Download Data from GitHub

Number of Files 2
File Type CSV
Total File Size 27.1 MB



Prosecution Data from the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office

What's in this dataset?

Spreadsheets of every charge processed to a disposition by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in 2013 and 2014, including dates, docket number, court, defendant race, charge, and disposition.

Download Data from GitHub
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Background

The aquisition and publication of this data has been made possible by Suffolk County resident Carol Pryor, who submitted a public records request with the Suffolk County District Attorney Office (SCDAO) and subsequently shared the information with the ACLU of Massachusetts.

public records request

Department of Defense 1033 Program

What's in this dataset?

Spreadsheet of transfers of military weapons to local law enforcement departments from 1994 to 2017.  Includes item name, quanitity, cost, and shipping date for police departments in 50 U.S. States and 4 U.S. Territories (District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands).

This data was directly received from the Defense Logistics Agency, a combat support agency in the United States Department of Defense.

Download Data from GitHub

Number of Files 1
File Type XLSX
Total File Size 9.3 MB
Number of Sheets 54
Number of Columns 10


Background

Originally posted on ACLUM.org

Using military equipment and tactics brought home from wars abroad, police departments across the country and in Massachusetts increasingly treat neighborhoods like combat zones. Massachusetts has already received more than 1,000 military weapons—including machine guns, grenade launchers and “peacekeeper armored vehicles”—through the 1033 program, which gives Department of Defense items to state and local law enforcement, without public oversight.

The ACLU has grave concerns about police militarization. We documented this dangerous trend in our national report War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, which the Obama White House cited in recommendations on how federal law enforcement agencies can support local agencies’ appropriate acquisition of equipment.

The ACLU of Massachusetts has also taken on this issue locally. We sued to challenge the secrecy surrounding the use of SWAT teams in Massachusetts, reaching a settlement agreement with the Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC) in 2015. The settlement resulted in a declaration that NEMLEC’s records are subject to the state’s public records law, and the disclosure of more than 900 pages of documents.

Our 2014 report on police militarization in Massachusetts, Our Homes Are Not Battlefields, details how the militarization of law enforcement relates to our work on racial justice, because it disproportionately targets the poor and people of color. In one particularly terrible local incident, an officer killed Eurie Stamps—an elderly, unarmed African-American grandfather of 12 in Framingham—when the city’s SWAT team used battering rams and flash bang grenades to smash into his apartment to search for Stamps’ stepson and another man suspected of dealing drugs.

Incidents like this show that treating our neighborhoods like battlefields is counterproductive and does not make us safer. We must demilitarize law enforcement agencies and ensure their focus is serving and protecting all of us, not finding uses for weapons and tactics of war.

Learn more by reading our report “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing”:


social media listening and command center

Data from Social Media Monitoring by Boston Police

What's in this dataset?

Spreadsheet of emails from 2014 to 2016 about social media surveillance by the Boston Police Department’s Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), including metadata (times, senders, recipients), subject, and text.

Download Data from GitHub
Number of Files1
File TypeCSV
Total File Size682 KB
Number of Rows1861
Number of Columns11

Background

In December 2016, the ACLU of Massachusetts filed a public records request with the Boston Police Department to find out if BPD had used a social media surveillance system called Geofeedia. The responsive documents show that the Boston Police Department’s Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) used Geofeedia in 2014, 2015 and 2016 to monitor First Amendment protected speech and association. The documents reveal that analysts at BRIC collected thousands of social media posts about political and social activism, current events, religious issues, and personal matters totally irrelevant to law enforcement concerns. The BPD treated ordinary citizens discussing ordinary affairs as justifiable targets of surveillance.

The documents were received in the form of thousands of PDFs with similar content structure. These documents were first OCR’d, and then had text extracted from them. Then, using regular expressions, they the content of the emails were inserted into a spreadsheet for aggregate analysis.


Police in riot gear

Police Arrest Data for Commonwealth of Massachusetts

What's in this dataset?

Spreadsheet of “low-level” arrests made in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 2012 to 2017. Includes county, arresting agency, date of arrest, offense, arrestee age (except for Suffolk County), arrestee gender (except for Suffolk County), and arrestee race.

Note that it is not clear how race and ethnicity were determined.

Download Data from GitHub

Number of Files 1
File Type CSV
Total File Size 14.3 MB
Number of Rows 104,913
Number of Columns 12


Background

In 2017, ACLUM filed a public records request with the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS) seeking information about arrests for a variety of lowlevel offenses in the Commonwealth. The above data was collected from over 300 police departments through the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) process.

The following charges were considered lowlevel for the purposes of this request:

  • Drug possession (possession of any illicit drug or drug paraphernalia)
  • Driving with a suspended license, driving with expired registration, driving without a
    license, and driving without insurance
  • Disorderly conduct (including the following: Affray, Disorderly Conduct, Misuse Of
    Flag, Disturb At School, Disturb Funeral Procession, Disturb At Public Assembly,
    Disturb Peace, Disorderly Person, Disturb Peace, Lewd & Lascivious Speech &
    Behavior)
  • Trespassing
  • Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations

Public Records Request

Back of computer systems with cords

Data

In the table below, find data sets related to criminal justice, public spending, and more. Click the name to learn more about each dataset, visit the corresponding public records request (if applicable), and download the data files for your own analysis.

In addition to data obtained by the ACLU, we’ve included links to relevant external sources of information.

NameData OriginYear PublishedCategoryData Host
National Police Scorecard ↗Various (FBI, Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Census Bureau...)2021Law EnforcementPolice Scorecard
Massachusetts Crime Statistics ↗Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security2020Law EnforcementMA EOPSS
Woke Windows: A Comprehensive Database on the Boston Police ↗Various2020Law EnforcementWoke Windows Project
Massachusetts Traffic Citations 2014-2019 (Temporarily Removed)Massachusetts Department of Transportation2020Law EnforcementData for Justice
2013-14 Suffolk County Prosecution DataSuffolk County District Attorney's Office2019Law EnforcementData for Justice
Massachusetts State Spending ↗Comptroller of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts2019Fiscal managementMA Comptroller
City of Boston Spending ↗City of Boston2019Fiscal managementAnalyze Boston
Stanford Open Policing Project ↗Stanford Computational Policy Lab2019Law EnforcementStanford Open Policing Project
Boston Police Crime Incident Reports ↗Boston Police Department2018Law EnforcementAnalyze Boston
Data from Social Media Monitoring by Boston PoliceBoston Police Department2018SurveillanceData for Justice
Department of Defense 1033 ProgramDefense Logistics Agency2018Law EnforcementData for Justice
Police Arrest Data for Commonwealth of MassachusettsMassachusetts Police Departments2018Law EnforcementData for Justice
Field, Interrogation, Observation Reports ↗Boston Police Department2017Law EnforcementAnalyze Boston
MA Precinct-Level Election Returns Massachusetts Secretary of State, Elections Division2022ElectionsData for Justice