- Identifying characteristics of the individual who received the warning or citation, or who was arrested, including race and gender;
- The traffic infraction;
- Whether a search was conducted as a result of the stop; and
- Whether the stop resulted in a warning, citation or arrest.
The law further mandated that the Executive Office of Public Safety hire a university in Massachusetts with expertise in racial profiling data analysis to analyze the Massachusetts citation data and prepare a report. The EOPS hired Northeastern University 's Institute on Race and Justice to conduct this study. Northeastern published its report on May 4, 2004, with significant input from a working group comprised of community organizations and advocates, state and local law enforcement agencies, state agency stakeholders, and researchers. A preliminary draft of the report was also shared with communities across Massachusetts through several regional forums.
The report analyzed citation and written warning data from 366 law enforcement agencies in Massachusetts. Under the statute, this phase of data collection did not include all traffic stops. Moreover, the analysis conducted by Northeastern was limited to race. After consultation with the sponsoring legislators, gender was not included in the analysis because the data being collected could not identify or quantify inappropriate interactions between officers and women drivers - the understood purpose of the gender component of the law.
The law empowered the Secretary of Public Safety to determine whether the data for a particular police department suggested an appearance of racial profiling and if so to order the department to collect data on all traffic stops. Based on the analysis performed by Northeastern, the Secretary concluded that for 249 police agencies (68%) there was statistically significant evidence to suggest racial disparities. The Secretary emphasized that the existence of racial disparities does not mean that a department has engaged in racial profiling, but rather that more data is needed to explore the reasons for the disparity.
In accordance with his statutory mandate, the 249 police agencies were notified that they were required to collect racial profiling data on all traffic stops. Of the 249 agencies mandated to collect more data, 130 filed appeals with the Office of the Attorney General, as permitted under the statute. In late October 2004, the Attorney General issued a decision upholding the Secretary in 128 out of the 130 appeals.
The mandated "Phase II" data collection took place from September 2005 to September 2006. In 2007, Secretary Kevin Burke sent questionnaires to all municipal police departments in Massachusetts to learn about compliance with the racial and gender profiling data collection mandated by Chapter 228 of the Acts of 2000, as well as current data collection practices. Of the 247 departments required to collect "Phase II" data for all traffic stops from, 235 responded to the survey. Of these 235 respondents:
- 233 indicated that they had completed the mandatory data collection
- 138 continue to collect data at present, and 116 indicate that they intended to continue to collect data in the future
- 140 reported using the EOPSS-created form to collect data; 104 collected data by some other method (19 reported using more than one method)
- 191 indicated they entered data using some form of software, and 138 reported having analyzed the data
Many of these departments maintain that they were unfairly identified in "Phase I" as possibly engaging in racial profiling because they experience a heavy volume of commuter traffic from drivers who do not reside in the local jurisdiction, and that this disparity was not properly taken into account.