It’s not often that the state’s highest court lectures the Legislature on its responsibilities. But last week it did in a case involving racial profiling — also known as driving while Black.
There’s only so much courts can do to address the systemic racism that too often characterizes interactions between police and people of color. Most of the levers for change lie with municipalities, police forces, and of course the Legislature. And so the Supreme Judicial Court in a unanimous opinion pleaded with lawmakers to step up and do their part to fix some of what has gone wrong.
In doing so, the court echoed the thousands of voices coming from the street in protest march after protest march since the death in May of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
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In three rulings the court tackled different aspects related to the “long history of race-based policing” in the state.
The case of Edward Long, a Black man pulled over by members of the Boston Police gang squad while driving his girlfriend’s Mercedes SUV, was part of that history. Police followed Long for a time as he drove through Dorchester’s Clam Point section, checked the car’s license plate, found the car was registered to a woman, not a man, and lacked a registration sticker.
They pulled him over, found he had outstanding warrants for driving without a license, arrested him, and searched the car, where they found a gun inside a bag in the back seat.
Long’s lawyers argued it was a classic case of driving while Black and brought in an expert in statistics to prove it.
“The discriminatory enforcement of traffic laws is not a minor annoyance to those who are racially profiled,” the court wrote. “To the contrary, these discriminatory practices cause great harm.”
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Long’s expert witness concluded that “the officers in this case were significantly more likely to conduct” a Field Interrogation and Observation (FIO) of a driver for a motor vehicle infraction if the driver was Black. In fact, of all the traffic citations issued by those officers, 56.59 percent were issued to Black drivers although Blacks made up only 24.38 percent of the city’s population. Of all vehicle-related FIOs made, 80.62 involved Black drivers.
The trial court judge in the case apparently wasn’t impressed enough with the statistical analysis to exclude the evidence found during Long’s traffic stop. The SJC was — but also concluded that producing such an analysis was an exceedingly high bar to meet.
The high court’s own “fix” is a substantial one, allowing defendants to introduce evidence about the totality of circumstances surrounding the stop — how long an officer followed the car, whether the officer was routinely assigned to traffic duty, how the officer behaved during the stop, and how dangerous the alleged traffic violation was.
But the court recognized that it cannot solve the problem alone. It then weighed in on a provision of the wide-ranging police reform bill stuck in a legislative conference committee for nearly two months as lawmakers iron out their differences.
The Senate version of the bill “would enable defendants to access publicly available, department-wide data on the demographics of all traffic stops, by officer, in the relevant municipality, and would provide a plethora of data to support (or weaken) equal protection claims,” the court said. The House version “completely omits” that provision.
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“We urge the Legislature to require the collection and analysis of officer-specific data,” the decision said, adding it would “help protect drivers from racially discriminatory traffic stops, and also would protect police officers who do not engage in such discriminatory stops.”
It is not uncommon for the high court to suggest to lawmakers that some law or other needs updating, that it is beyond the power of the court to set things right. But rarely — if ever — has the court taken sides in what amounts to a dispute between the branches.
This one section is far from the only flaw in the House version of the policing bill, but a provision that gets the attention of the Supreme Judicial Court also ought to get the attention of the stuck-in-neutral conference committee.
Fixing a problem like racial profiling requires knowing where it exists. The court sees that as essential to justice. Lawmakers should as well.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.
