Data

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”: