I just finished pushing updated traffic citation data to the Woke Windows database.
Previously, Woke Windows just had the traffic tickets written in 2019. Now we have data spanning the years 2011 through 2020.
These records have fields indicating: the Boston Police officer who wrote the ticket, the location where the ticket was written, the race and sex of the driver, and much more.
Caveat
There is a discrepancy between the 2019 dataset and the new 2011 - 2020 dataset.
There are 119 citations that appear in the 2019 dataset but do not appear in the new data.
I haven’t identified a pattern to explain why these citations disappeared. If you have a theory, or if you have more MassDOT traffic ticket data I could compare against, please reach out!
Get the data
There are a few ways you can access this data:
- Do you want to quickly browse all the tickets without downloading anything? Try the big table of traffic citations on Woke Windows.
- Do you want to browse tickets written by a particular officer? Look up an individual officer on Woke Windows and view all the data we have on that officer, including traffic tickets written.
- Do you want to download a spreadsheet which you can filter in Excel (e.g. take all the tickets written by one-or-more officers and then do an analysis based on location, race, etc.)? Download data formatted for Excel; these spreadsheets have been joined with Boston PD roster data, making it easy to identify the officer who wrote each ticket.
- Do you need the raw data provided by MassDOT? See 2011 - 2020 Traffic Tickets.
Conclusion
Finally, if you are a developer, the source code is available on GitHub at nstory/boston_pd_citations and nstory/wokewindows.
Thank you to Josh Raisler Cohn for making the public records request for this data and sharing the response with me.