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By Kapish Kalita
SAUGUS, MA – Police statistics aren’t adding up here and other Massachusetts cities.
While Massachusetts law requires police to collect data about drivers for traffic stops that end in a written warning or citation, police are not required to collect data on drivers they give verbal warnings,” according to a story in USA Today.
And, USA Today added, officers record the racial background of individuals when giving out citations, with the state of Massachusetts including Hispanics as a racial option for cops because, “While Hispanic is widely considered an ethnicity, not a race, it is the option intended for them.”
However, according to USA Today, in “57 cities and towns, like Saugus – a predominantly white Boston suburb – police marked the majority of men with Hispanic surnames as white on traffic tickets.”
USA Today noted in Saugus, “Lopez” is “the most common surname among men stopped by Saugus police from January 2014 to July 2020,” with “Saugus police identifying more than 60 percent of men named Lopez as white in traffic stops over the six-year period,” although “the U.S. Census, just under five percent of Americans with the last name Lopez identified as white.”
In addition, USA Today noted how “eight of 10 of the most common surnames of men stopped by Saugus police were Hispanic, based on the USA TODAY Network analysis, which deemed a surname Hispanic if at least 80 percent of people with the same name identified as Hispanic in the U.S. census.”
The surnames listed were Lopez, Mendez, Rodriguez, Chavez, Martinez, Hernandez, DeLeon, and Rivera.
USA Today added “court records reveal some drivers Saugus police marked as white had given the officers passports and licenses from Central and South American countries” and “internal police reports that offer spots to mark race and ethnicity, and as white on the traffic citations used in court proceedings and racial profiling research, which only have a race field” further demonstrates the Saugus police skewed labeling.
In addition to the false labeling, USA Today noted in “more than half of those cases the driver, who was marked white by police on the citation, requested a Spanish interpreter in court.”
USA Today emphasized these cases are not solely found in Saugus and have happened across the state of Massachusetts.
The findings listed by USA Today are part of the publication’s analysis of “millions of Massachusetts traffic citation records between 2014 and 2022 to identify racial disparities in traffic enforcement.”
USA Today wrote the “analysis found that 152 departments showed a significant disparity in at least one of six disparity metrics,” including warning disparity, arrest disparity, resident citation disparity, search disparity, hit rate disparity and veil of darkness disparity.
