Traffic Citations

Traffic tickets issued by the Boston Police Department (BPD)

Warning: there are questions regarding the completeness of these data

Overview

Citations issued for speeding, marked lanes violation, and a variety of other infractions are made using a standard form provided by the Massachusetts Department of Transporation (MassDOT) called the Massachusetts Uniform Citation.

Massachusetts Uniform Citation Download a high-resolution PDF of this form

When an officer issues a citation, a copy of that citation is sent to MassDOT where it is scanned and entered into a database. The traffic citations we display on Woke Windows come from a public records request to MassDOT.

Caveats

  • records are for the years 2011 - 2020
  • there are questions regarding the completeness of these records (whether this is in-fact all citations issued in this time period); we have observed a variance in the total number of citations between datasets provided by MassDOT

How to Access these Data

We make traffic citation data available in the following ways:

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