How Data Extraction Illuminates Racial Disparities in Boston SWAT Raids

For eight years, between 2012 and 2020, Boston Police documented 262 incidents to which they responded by deploying SWAT units. 

The “after-action” reports created by police officers tell stories about SWAT teams battering down doors, deploying aerosol grenades, waking people as they slept in bed, and detaining relatives of suspects and children. According to the reports written by the police themselves, some of the people who were subjected to these uses of force were not targets, but rather roommates, family members, or children who were present during the raid.

The reports showed that 105 children under the age of 18 lived in homes subjected to BPD SWAT raids during these eight years. Of those 105 children, 25 were under the age of five. 

In 2020, the City Council voted to pass an order requiring the mayor to release information about the Boston Police Department’s inventory of military-grade equipment, technically referred to as an internal 17F order. Under the 17F order, the SWAT after-action reports were made public, and the ACLU Massachusetts and the Data for Public Justice Project acquired them.

Unfortunately, the SWAT after-action reports were difficult to analyze in bulk and unreadable by machines. The team would need to programmatically extract data from the reports in order to use them effectively.

Through a connection with Cynthia Conti-Cook of the Ford Foundation, HRDAG worked with the Data for Justice Project and the ACLU of Massachusetts to extract structured data from the reports. In September, 2023, the team released a report and a tool that allows the public to visualize and analyze the after-action reports. HRDAG data scientist Tarak Shah is named in the acknowledgments for his help extracting data from the after-action reports, which were received as non-machine-readable PDFs.

A significant portion of the SWAT events took place in three districts that correspond to three majority non-white neighborhoods: Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester.

There are significant racial disparities in those targeted and all those affected by raids — 56 percent  of those targeted by raids were Black non-Hispanic and 8.5 percent were Black Hispanic. These figures are disproportionate to the share of Black residents in Boston. (As of the 2020 Census, 25.5 percent of Boston’s population was Black or African American.)

Further readings

ACLU Massachusetts. 27 September, 2023.
Investigating Boston Police Department SWAT Raids from 2012 to 2020.

Acknowledgments

HRDAG was supported in this work by MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Heising Simons Foundation, and Open Society Foundations.

Image: Photo by Isaac Kohane, CC BY-NC 2.0. Caption: In Boston, the police deployed SWAT teams disproportionately to Black neighborhoods.

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