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Funding urged for profiling study Lawmaker says survey should be Romney priority By Bill Dedman, Globe Correspondent, 7/24/2003
Responding to a series of articles in The Boston Globe on disparities in traffic tickets and warnings, Senator Jarrett T. Barrios asked the Senate Committee on Ways and Means to include funds in revisions to this year's budget. Barrios, a Democrat from Cambridge, is the Senate chairman of the Joint Committee on Public Safety. The Globe reported this week that local police in Massachusetts were far more likely to write warnings to whites and women for the same traffic offenses. In 2000, the Legislature ordered the Registry of Motor Vehicles to track a year's tickets and warnings as a test for evidence of profiling. The Registry staff typed in all tickets, but stopped after two months of warnings in 2001, for lack of funds. Governor Mitt Romney asked for $840,000 in this year's budget to continue the effort, but the Legislature cut that to $150,000. Barrios said he asked the Republican governor this week to sign on to his request, but Romney declined. ''They asked for the money in the first place, so presumably they believed it was important back then,'' Barrios said. The Romney administration said it still supports studying the issue, but now isn't the time to add to the budget. ''Now that the Legislature has overridden 200 vetoes, for a total of $175 million, it doesn't make fiscal sense for us to ask for more funding that would throw the budget even more out of balance,'' said Dave Shaw, spokesman for Romney's secretary of public safety, Edward A. Flynn. Two House members of the public safety committee said they joined in Barrios's request: the House chairman of the committee, Representative Timothy J. Toomey Jr., a Cambridge Democrat, and Representative Michael E. Festa, a Melrose Democrat and chairman of the state party's public policy committee. Bill Dedman can be reached at [email protected]. The Globe study of tickets and warnings is at www.boston.com/globe/tickets.
This story ran on page B6 of the Boston Globe on 7/24/2003.
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he state should find the money to complete its study of racial and gender profiling by police officers, the chairman of the state Legislature's public safety committee said yesterday.
