Boston Globe reporter Todd Wallack reported on a revealing experiment performed by a Northeastern University journalism class working with the Globe and WCVB-TV. To test compliance with the state's public records law, they contacted every municipality in the state, asking for two kinds of records that should be public: municipal salaries, and details on "use of force" policies for local police.
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Fifty-eight percent did not reply within the 10-day period required by law.
Wallack spoke with our director for the story:
“There really is no excuse for agencies to hide use of force policies,” said Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. “It doesn’t undermine public safety, it enhances public safety.”
Read more in Most localities fail test on state records law, as well as Wallack's follow-up piece the next day: Baker surprised by cities, towns failing public records law.
And please stay tuned: if you don't already, follow us on Twitter @ACLU_Mass, on Facebook, or sign up for our email list. We'll be hard at work right away in 2016 to pass public records reform.
Update: Great reporting on this from Mike Beaudet at Channel 5 shows the need for reform in 2016. Watch 5 Investigates: Most Mass. cities and towns fail public records test.
Date
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - 1:45am
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Our executive director Carol Rose teamed up with Cheryl Zoll, CEO at Tapestry Health, to respond to Governor Baker's proposal for dealing with opioid use. From their perspectives on both civil liberties and public health, they offer their advice in a piece published in the Boston Globe, called State’s opioid crisis needs a public health approach.
As they argue:
[P]roposals to end the crisis need to go beyond old ways of thinking of substance abuse as a crime. For more than 40 years, America has been trying to arrest and coerce its way to decreased substance abuse and addiction. Today’s epidemic proves the futility of that approach. The Drug War has failed. Proposals to fight addiction that simply repackage those tactics also will fail.
If Massachusetts is serious about ending the opioid crisis, we need a new approach, one that invests in public health rather than prisons. An effective plan would include treatment on demand and social services that do not take place in correctional settings and do not depend on coercion and imprisonment.
Then the Globe followed with an editorial of their own, Baker’s opioid plan needs careful review. The Globe zeroed in on one of our main areas of concern too: a provision that allows people to be held against their will for 72 hours. The Editorial Board wrote:
Sidestepping the courts to empower medical professionals to commit addicts involuntarily is fraught with complications and could have serious unintended consequences, damaging the doctor-patient relationship if addicts fear seeking medical treatment, and pushing more people into a system that is already beyond capacity.
As shown in the photo above, Carol Rose and our staff attorney Jessie Rossman testified on the proposal yesterday before the state legislature's Mental Health & Substance Abuse Committee. We hope to see changes that reflect the concerns that we and many others have raised.
Date
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - 1:30am
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The Boston Globe today covered the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that bars police from stopping drivers solely for suspected marijuana, quoting our legal director:
Matthew Segal, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts [said] that with the vote to decriminalize marijuana in 2008, residents of the Commonwealth were making a statement “about how the police ought to spend their time and the taxpayers’ money.”
Pulling over a car on suspicion of marijuana possession, he said, is “not consistent with the Massachusetts constitution, nor is it consistent with the will of the voters who passed decriminalization.”
Continued police emphasis on marijuana raises particular concerns because of racial disparities in drug enforcement. Watch the ACLU video Marijuana: One Drug, Two Stories to learn more.
Date
Tuesday, September 22, 2015 - 10:30pm
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