Let ACLU shed light on BPD’s gang data

Ever since the ACLU and other organizations filed a lawsuit seeking information about the Boston Police Department’s “Gang Assessment Database,” there has been a great deal of heat but not much light. Commissioner William G. Gross viciously attacked the ACLU (receiving editorial support from the Herald). So what is going on? First, there is no question that gangs are bad. This is not a defense of them in any way. Second, there is no dispute that the BPD maintains a database that seeks to identify persons who are, or may be, associated with gangs. Various activities or attributes are assigned “points” and then persons are identified as having more or less likelihood of being related to gangs. But the ACLU asserts that the way those points are assigned and the use of those points is concealed from the public. Further, it claims that the consequences of being designated in the database as a gang member or gang associate are severe and land disproportionately on minorities. Accordingly, the ACLU wants access not to the database itself, but to the policies relating to the database, how it is used, and some statistical information. To be clear, it is incorrect to say that the ACLU wants access to the database itself. Instead, it wants to know about the database. Now I am not always a fan of the ACLU, particularly lately when it seems to have entirely lost its way on issues of free speech. In this case, however, it has a point. Whenever the government collects secret information about the citizens and creates a database, I am concerned. I am particularly concerned when the information is collected secretly, through informants, and relates to persons not convicted of any crime. The potential for abuse — not just intentionally, but through mistake or inadvertence — can be very high. I remember several people a few years ago, one of them a then-law firm partner of mine, whose lives were made very difficult because they were accidentally put on the “no-fly list” because their names were similar to actual bad guys (it turns out that the federal government did not understand that Kennedy and Murphy were very common). I am also old enough to remember when the FBI created lists of suspected Communists based on little more than the magazines people read or their support for civil rights. So great care needs to be taken to ensure that the proper functioning of the database is not interfered with. On the other hand, the idea that the ACLU’s attempt to get some basic information is an attack on the BPD is just inflammatory and wrong. We want the police to be able to fight gangs, but an open society also gets to know how the government collects and uses information about its citizens.