‘One of the worst offenders’: Why it’s hard to get public records from the Mass. State Police
A fatal bicycle crash in Cambridge piqued the interest of John Allen, an avid bicyclist. He doubted law enforcement's view that drivers of cars involved in the 2016 accident were not at fault.
The Middlesex District Attorney released the State Police's crash reconstruction report and other evidence, but Allen wanted more information, so last fall he made a public records request to the State Police.
More than four months later, he hasn't heard back, aside from an automatic reply that his request was received. The state's Public Records Law gives agencies 10 business days to detail what documents could fulfill a request.
"It's frustrating," he said.
Allen's experience is common.
Data the State Police must report to the state shows the agency responded to about 25% requests last year in the same quarter that they were submitted. That rate was similar to the previous few years' figures.
In less than 1% of cases last year, a requester received records from the State Police within the quarter they asked for them. The agency opted to upload the data in quarterly batches and so the numbers do not reflect what happened, if anything, to the request after that quarter. Additional data the State Police provided The Republican did not provide more information on the response rate or how often someone received requested records.
The State Police are "one of the worst offenders when it comes to the Massachusetts public records law," said Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition. "They are known for their secrecy and the lack of response that they give to public records requests."
One defense attorney says her inability to obtain records from the State Police contributed to keeping a man who was later exonerated in prison for an additional six years. Advocates say the agency's track record reflects a larger weakness in the state's public record system. A lack of enforcement leaves requesters with the choice of either giving up or taking the State Police to court.
"The result is the public suffers because they don't know what their government is up to," said Michael Morisy, chief executive officer of MuckRock, a nonprofit that helps make and track records requests across the country.
The agency faces ongoing lawsuits about records access, including from the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defender service, which alleges the State Police have a "regular practice of flouting the Public Records Law." The Boston Globe is also suing and alleges the State Police have a "serial pattern and practice of violating the Public Records Law."
The State Police declined an interview request. A spokesperson said the agency has significantly increased its staff in recent years to meet the demand for records, which has grown since the adoption of body cameras.
"It is the State Police's policy and practice to fully comply with the public records law and to continually improve its responsive operations," he wrote in an email.
"To the extent records requests responses remain incomplete beyond the statutory timeframe," his statement said, "this is not the result of any Department policy or practice intended to violate the law or delay responses, but a reflection of the extraordinary [public records request] caseload."
Of all the agencies that report data to the state, the State Police received the most requests by far – nearly 14,000 last year. The agency was also the subject of the most appeals over public records compared to any state or municipal office last year, an analysis of the Secretary of the Commonwealth's appeals database shows. The city of Boston was a close second, and when combining appeals against the city's municipal records office and police department, the city had the most appeals.
But the agency has long been criticized over public records. In 2015, the nonprofit group Investigative Reporters and Editors gave the agency its Golden Padlock Award , an annual dishonor that goes to the most secretive agency or person in the country.
What the law requires
A state law requires that agencies submit data to the Secretary of the Commonwealth about the records requests they get and how they respond. About 150 offices report that information.
Most agencies report annually. The State Police upload data quarterly, cutting off their reporting window. The law states the Secretary of the Commonwealth shall collect the data annually. State Police upload their information quarterly because of their request volume, a spokesperson said.
The agency receives by far the most requests each year. In 2025, it received nearly four times more than the next-most requested state office, the Department of Public Health.
Agencies have 10 business days to reply. An automatic response does not meet that requirement. A formal reply must include, among other components, what records the office can produce, justification for why it can't release any records and any fees that might be charged.
Massachusetts State Police Barracks on Liberty Street in Springfield. March 5, 2026. (Douglas Hook / The Republican)Douglas Hook
The State Police provided The Republican with an additional data set detailing how it responded to public records in 2024 and 2025. It omitted the initial response dates, however, making it impossible to get better information on how often the State Police are meeting the 10 business days response deadline. The data did not detail if a requester got any records they asked for, only when the agency closed out the request.
The Republican requested more comprehensive response date information and the office declined to provide it.
Dates are filled out in a column marked "the date on which a public record is provided to the requestor," but a spokesperson for the State Police said a denial letter counts as a public record, making it impossible to know whether a requester received any requested documents. The dates then reflect when the request was closed out.
It showed that as of this month, 68% of requests from 2025 were closed, taking an average of 106 days. It also showed that the vast majority of requests from 2024 had been closed and took an average of 131 days.
In response to an appeal, the state Supervisor of Records' office will weigh in on the case and issue a letter. But the office can't force anyone to turn over records.
"The decisions don't really mean anything in terms of enforcement," Morisy said.
The records supervisor can refer cases to the Attorney General's Office, but it typically only does that a few times each year, according Debra O'Malley, a spokesperson for the Secretary of the Commonwealth's Office. One referral in the past five years was about the State Police. Referring a case to the Attorney General's Office can take years, and so they try to address cases through "follow-up and compliance, if at all possible," O'Malley said.
Sometimes the supervisor's decision can provide leverage to obtain records, Silverman said. "But a lot of times it's not very helpful because these aren't binding decisions that can be enforced," he said. That leaves people with two options: file a lawsuit, or hope that the Attorney General's Office will pursue the case, which is rare.
"That's the biggest flaw," Silverman said, "that when the law isn't being followed, there isn't a lot of recourse for the requester to push back and get the information that they're seeking."
Litigation can take years, Morisy said. "It's a very hard decision for a lot of folks to make. Agencies know this," he said. "They also know if they lose, worst case scenario they have to hand over the records and then probably whatever scandal that was is out of the news."
In 2016, lawmakers passed public records law reform, which allows the court to award attorneys' fees in public records cases. Morisy and Silverman see that as a positive development, but not enough. "You need to find a way to create consequences for agencies when they violate the law," Morisy.
Some have won attorneys' fees against the State Police, including in late 2025 when a judge awarded CPCS $23,000 in fees. In early 2026, the public defenders were awarded $29,000 in another case.
Efforts to strengthen the system beyond the 2016 reform have not succeeded. State Rep. Antonio Cabral, D-New Bedford, filed a bill that would institute a $500 monthly fine for agencies breaking the public records law and give more power to the state's supervisor of records. He filed similar legislation in past sessions that never advanced.
The issue indicates larger concerns in the state's public records law, Silverman said. "The problems that we see with the State Police, not all of them are unique to that agency," he said. "Where it's more concerning, when you have State Police involved, is that it's a law enforcement agency with a lot more power than other public agencies, and secrecy in that case can be far more detrimental."
A Massachusetts State Police cruiser is parked in the center of Springfield on Thursday morning. March 5, 2026. (Douglas Hook / The Republican)Douglas Hook
A long wait by incarcerated man
That was the case for one wrongly convicted incarcerated man, Raymond Champagne, who was exonerated in 2020 after serving more than 40 years in prison for murdering a fellow inmate at a prison in Walpole in the 1970s. A Springfield native, he was incarcerated in the '70s for a robbery, then was later convicted of the murder.
When Lisa M. Kavanaugh took on his case, she requested related public records from the State Police in August 2012. She received heavily redacted documents in February 2013, and she appealed to the state supervisor of records.
They went back and forth, but she did not obtain the unredacted documents from them, she said, despite follow-up with both the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office and State Police. Six months after submitting the request, Kavanaugh, who is director of the Committee for Public Counsel Service's Innocence Program, directed her efforts elsewhere on the case.
In 2018, she finally got unredacted copies of the records voluntarily turned over from the Norfolk prosecutor's office. They shed light on an inmate who had originally been caught mopping the victim's blood and told authorities that he found the victim's blood-stained pants in Champagne's cell.
The documents showed that several years later, the man had been been accused of a sexual assault and of telling the victim that if he reported it, "the same thing would happen to him that happened to that guy in Walpole" and that "while in Walpole, he stabbed a guy and then gave the bloody pants to another guy and blamed him."
"It was literally the smoking gun," Kavanaugh said.
The documents "could have been a real factor in the jury's deliberations," the Commonwealth wrote in a court document explaining why it wasn't opposing Champagne's motion for a new trial. Champagne was later exonerated.
Kavanaugh said the prosecutor's office originally declined her request to turn over the records, which is why she went to the State Police. Had she gotten the unredacted records from the State Police earlier, she believes the case would have moved faster. "Because of how they handled those disclosures, Ray spent six extra years in prison," Kavanaugh said. "So it had this very direct cost to him."
A few years later, Champagne died in 2022 in a motorcycle accident at 67.
A case of 'serial noncompliance'
Andrew Quemere is a Massachusetts freelance journalist who writes " The Mass Dump ," a newsletter focused on law enforcement and public records. Over the last decade he's filed nearly 50 appeals over requests he made to the State Police.
In the past, he has struggled to get responses to his requests unless he followed up. "That is in general my experience – you don't get a response unless you work for it, which is not how the public records law is supposed to work," he said.
In May 2024, he requested employment and internal affairs records for one officer. He got a response in October informing him the department was researching the request, but because it had been more than 90 days since he submitted the request, they wanted to know if he was still interested. If he didn't reply in 10 days, the agency would close his request. The law says the agency should itself have replied in 10 business days.
When asked how often requests are closed for that reason, a state police spokesperson said they don't track why requests are closed.
"It's not a big ask for such a well-funded agency to simply follow the law," Quemere said, pointing to the State Police's half a billion dollar budget . "Especially when they claim their role is law enforcement, at the minimum we should expect law enforcement to follow the law."
Pending public records lawsuits from CPCS and The Boston Globe ask the court to issue injunctions to force the State Police to follow the law.
An injunction could help people like Quemere. As a journalist, police records access is an issue in his work, but he thinks the alarm should go beyond the media industry. "I think the wider public needs to be concerned about it," he said. To him, the State Police's lack of compliance "speaks to the ideology and culture of police in this country – that they don't see themselves as accountable to the public or the law even."
Sometimes, a record is not provided for justifiable reasons. The law lists instances when records, or portions of them, might be exempt from public disclosure. For example, shielded records include documents that are part of open police investigations, medical records, reports of rape and a government employee's personal contact information.
The form state agencies fill out to track their record responses doesn't include a field for that, though, according to O'Malley. Sometimes a requester will ask for a document that does not exist, she added.
In response to a question from The Republican, a State Police spokesperson said the agency does not track why requests are closed, whether it was because records were sent, a requester didn't reply to a follow-up in 10 business days, or the records were exempt.
When asked if the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office was concerned about the State Police's response rate, O'Malley said the staff collects information for the Legislature and does not analyze the data. She noted that law enforcement has many records that would be exempt from public disclosure.
"The office doesn't have the authority to investigate the data in these logs," O'Malley wrote in an email. "Of course, if the AG's office chose to do so, they could use the information in those public reports for any enforcement of the Public Records Law."
A requestor can appeal a response, or lack of response, to the state Supervisor of Records.
Last year, more than 200 of the 3,200 appeals that office received were about the State Police. That amounted to more appeals than any city, town or state office received, except for Boston. The city of Boston's records office received nearly the same number of appeals, and its Police Department – reported as a separate entity – had an additional 134 appeals logged.
To help increase access to public records, the New England First Amendment Coalition launched a legal fund last year with funding from the Knight Foundation. It supports journalism and open government litigation.
Silverman, NEFAC's executive director, said he thinks daily about how to communicate the importance of public records access to the public.
"It's our money, our tax dollars that are supporting these agencies, and they need to be working on our behalf," he said. "There's no way we can know if they are working in our best interest if they don't provide the transparency that's required by the law. … Everybody has an interest in transparency and a stake in how our tax dollars are being spent."
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