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Ludlow police chief says glitch caused report error
By Bill Dedman, Globe Staff, 1/25/2003
A Globe report on racial profiling earlier this month ranked police departments by compliance with state law, which requires officers to show race on traffic tickets. Nearly 10 percent of Ludlow's tickets showed no race, according to records from the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
But Ludlow Police Chief James J. McGowan said this week that his department recently completed a hand search of all the traffic citations and found that officers occasionally recorded white drivers as "C" for Caucasian, rather than "W" for white, as the law requires. Data entry operators at the Registry of Motor Vehicles recorded the tickets marked "C" as blanks.
In fact, McGowan said, the department failed to record the race of the ticket recipient in only 10 of its 861 citations. Three of those were mailed to the violator, so the officer would have been unable to determine race, he added. Using the new figures, Ludlow showed a failure rate of 1.2 percent, which is below the statewide average.
This story ran on page B6 of the Boston Globe on 1/25/2003.
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t was a technical glitch, not a failure to comply with the law that made the Ludlow Police Department rank among the worst in the state at recording the race of drivers on traffic tickets, the Ludlow Police Department chief said.
