Rights & Privacy Senior
Capstone Project

Building a data tool to help defense attorneys and their clients fight wrongful charges resulting from racially targeted traffic stops.

Our Theory of Change

If we provide Massachusetts defense attorneys with digestible data reports to identify racial disparities in an officer's or department's history of traffic stops, then defense attorneys will be better equipped to advocate for their clients of color facing charges resulting from pretextual stops because they will be better positioned to file Long Motions.

Pictured below: the Rights and Privacy student team visiting our legal partners at Roxbury Municipal Court in November 2023. We observed a defense team arguing for a motion to suppress and got in-person feedback on our report's design from practicing defense attorneys.

The Team

This project exists within a class which students can choose to take for 1-3 semesters. I took this class as a senior capstone for two semesters; in my first semester I was part of a team of six students and one faculty advisor, and in my second semester the team expanded to seven students. The project was heavily student-led, with a team focusing on the design of the reports and another team working on the data analytics and report generation.

I was the team's project manager, managing the team's priorities, deadlines, and partner relationships. I was also on the design team in my first semester, conducting codesigns with defense attorneys and implementing their feedback on our report prototypes.

Who are our stakeholders and partners?

Our primary partner in this project is CPCS, the Massachusetts Committee for Public Council Services. Within CPCS, we worked with a coalition of defense attorneys, data analysts, expert witness statisticians, and paralegals to understand the context and impacts of our work. In May 2024, the project was passed on to CPCS to maintain in their own self-contained database.

We also worked with DARRCC (Demilitarize, Accountability, Reimagine, Reallocate Community Coalition), a grassroots organization in Brockton, MA focused on fighting police brutality and systemic racism in their community. We stood in solidarity with them and learned from their efforts to fight our unjust criminal legal system.

What do these reports look like?

Between September and December 2023, the team worked on developing the visual design of one-page reports that are accessible to defense attorneys using CPCS' online database. These reports contain preliminary statistics on police officers, showing whether an officer issues citations to people of color at disproportionate rates when compared to Census population data. This data can be used to argue that a defendant was racially profiled and that the stop was unconstitutional. Once this is established, attorneys can file a motion to suppress, which eliminates evidence (such as a firearm) that was collected unconstitutionally.

The team conducted 10 codesigns with defense attorneys, gathering feedback on readability, what kinds of numbers should be displayed, and trustworthiness of our report. We incorporated this feedback in a prototype of the report, which is shown on the right.

How are these reports generated?

Using police rosters collected by CPCS and publicly accessible Massachusetts Department of Transportation data, we can match an officer's badge number, name, and citation reports. We conduct simple data analytics on this data and use citation population data as a benchmark to give defense attorneys a general idea of what kinds of trends to look for when they hire an expert witness statistician or request access to more data through a motion for discovery or a public records request.