A Vision for Non-Police Responses to Community Incidents in Boston

The Boston Police Department (BPD) has been tasked with responding to a wide variety of incidents and situations, many of which fall beyond core law enforcement responsibilities. Too Blue analyzes publicly available data from the City of Boston, with the aim of answering two questions:

  • What types of incidents do the Boston Police Department respond to? and

  • Which of these incident types could be handled more efficiently and effectively by non-police alternatives to meet community needs?

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The report divides these incidents into six broad categories, each of which represents a different type of community need and includes a list of specific incident descriptions:

Boston spends a large portion of city funds — more than $425 million dollars in 2020 —to fund a police response to a wide array of incidents.  Police in Boston are being used a catch-all solution to many problems that Boston residents may have, including several issues that could be more appropriately handled without law enforcement intervention.

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In Boston, 12% of all events logged in the police incident database concern motor vehicles, including traffic stops, responding to car accidents, and towing cars. Traffic stops occur overwhelmingly in neighborhoods of color, as the map below shows. Five out of the six zip codes with the highest per-capita rate of traffic-stop incidents which are often the result of pretextual traffic-stops are also five of the six zip codes with the highest proportion of Black residents. Additionally, the dataset reveals that approximately 75% of people who were subject to field interrogation in traffic stops in 2018 were Black, three times higher than their proportion of the population.

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Recommendation 1: Alternative Responses

The primary recommendation is that the City of Boston—and other municipalities in the Commonwealth—research and piloting or implement alternatives to police responses. For each category, or specific incidents within them, we offer alternative, real-world solutions that are currently in practice in other municipalities around the country, including:

  • Community-based public safety system to respond to a wide range of mental-health related crises;

  • Unarmed traffic enforcement and civilian response to minor traffic accidents; and

  • Investment in evidence-backed, community-based strategies to reduce violence.

Recommendation 2: Independent Budget Analysis

We encourage the city to assign an independent investigatory entity to undertake an in-depth audit and analysis of the Boston Police Department’s budget with a view toward decreasing bloated spending patterns. This includes the use of voluntary overtime. A transparent and close look at how the police department’s budget is currently being spent would provide important insight into pragmatically shifting resources to community-based and non-police alternatives.

Recommendation 3:  Analysis of “Investigations”

We recommend further research from within and outside BPD to better understand police incidents concerning ‘investigations’ and trends over time.

Recommendation 4: Improve Policing Data Transparency

Finally, while we commend the City of Boston for making the police interactions and other datasets public-facing, the city should make the following improvements to the datasets:

  • Integrate the current public-facing datasets to enable analysis across the entire policing process. This includes adding a dataset that combines field interrogation observations (FIOs), 911 calls (ideally an expanded version of what is currently made public with more descriptions), police incidents and arrests/summons.

  • Improve the Incident dataset by adding fields on age, race, ethnicity, and whether an incident led to an arrest or summons.

  • Use consistent and detailed offense descriptions, following the categories in use prior to October 2019.