Attorney Wood recently consulted on and was a signatory (as MACDL’s representative) to an amicus brief in Commonwealth v. Sweeting-Bailey. This brief by a coalition of civil rights groups explains why gang databases are artificial racist constructs and unreliable indicators of criminal behavior. Therefore, the fact that someone has been placed in a gang database should not be a basis for reasonable suspicion that he or she has committed a crime. Read the brief here.

Much like recent scholarship and legal advocacy attacking police reliance on the notion of "high crime areas" to justify seizures and searches, this brief explains how designating people as "validated" gang members criminalizes being Black or brown in Massachusetts.

The authors of this brief include representatives of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, the New England Innocence Project, Rights Behind Bars, as well as MACDL. This powerful coalition hopes that the SJC will use this argument to develop Fourth Amendment law in ways that reduce racial disparities in police-citizen street encounters by forcing police to justify decisions to stop people with empirically reliable evidence of criminal conduct that are not hopelessly infected with racism.