About seven years ago, Randolph’s town leadership started to discuss what would happen after the expiration of a federal consent decree that required the police department to hire based on the city’s demographics.
That decree expired Dec. 31.
What the brain trust of Randolph came up with was a residency clause in each officer’s contract which requires them to live in the city after hiring.
“We have seen that since we started that, the diversity within the department is significantly higher than when it was just the previous Castro decree,” said Brian Howard, Randolph’s current town manager. He was assistant town manager during the initial discussions.
The Castro decree was implemented in 1974 to ensure diversity among entry-level officers in the commonwealth, settling a discrimination lawsuit called Castro v. Beecher . The decree initially applied to nearly 100 municipalities across Massachusetts. However, throughout the years most departments were exempted from it after reaching racial balance that matches their jurisdiction demographics. When it expired in December, Randolph and Holyoke were the only police departments in the commonwealth still under the consent decree.
With the last fragments of the diversity mandate having now expired, many advocates worry that racial balance among departments statewide will backslide.
In Randolph, the city was proactive. The city has gone through a major demographic shift, transitioning from a city of 85% white population in 1990 to a 28% white population in 2020.
Under the Castro decree, a third of new hires with the Randolph Police Department were people of color. Howard said that the residency clause greatly outperformed that ratio.
Of the last 31 officers hired by the Randolph Police Department, 27 have been people of color, Howard said. With the enforcement of the residency clause, the department is being diversified far more quickly, he added.
“Without a doubt, the residency component that we added had a much greater impact over the last five years than with [the] Castro [decree],” Howard said.
While Randolph had an alternative solution, Howard pointed out that the decree probably had more impact on less diverse communities.
“Now in a town that is far, far less diverse than Randolph, Castro would help them in trying to diversify the force,” he said. “If you’re in a community that is not very diverse, it can be a struggle to get officers of color. In Randolph’s case, it would have had far greater impact in the '80s, in the '90s and in the early 2000s.”
The mayor’s office of Holyoke did not respond to requests for comment on the expiration of the consent decree. In 2021, the city told New England Public Media that
about 65% of its police officers were white
— in a city with a white population of just over 40%.
The risk of backsliding
Advocates are concerned that when the consent decrees expire, cities may revert back to being less diverse.
“Once a jurisdiction reached so-called parity … then jurisdictions could petition to be released from the consent decree,” said Oren Sellstrom, litigation director with Lawyers for Civil Rights. “Once the jurisdictions are no longer under court supervision, then at least for some jurisdictions, those gains that have been made are eroded.”
For instance, Fall River, with a white population of 74%, was exempted from the Castro decree before 2002.
Fall River Police Department had achieved a level of racial balance with its hiring, enough to be exempted from the police consent decree. However, the police force became less diverse.
A report from The Brattle Group , a Boston-based consulting firm, measured the level of racial parity of Fall River’s police department to that of its overall demographics. A measure close to 1 indicated parity between the department and the jurisdiction. In 1990, the Fall River Police Department had a parity measure of 0.8 for Black and Hispanic officers. In 2016, that measure was less than 0.2.
Ross Aubin, a sergeant with the Fall River Police Department, said that hiring preference is given to the 94,000 residents of Fall River. As a civil service municipality, the hiring and promotional practices of its public service agencies are governed by the state’s Human Resources Division. Applicants take a civil service test, which is administered by the state and “goes down the list” when hiring new officers, Aubin said.
“But on selecting [police officers] based on race, we don’t do that. That would be unethical. Everyone has a fair opportunity when taking the test,” Aubin said.
Worcester, the state’s second largest city, emerged from a consent decree and has continued to make progress in diversifying its police force. Since the consent decree ended in 2022, the Worcester Police Department has assigned four officers to DEI-related efforts with two officers working on the department’s “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion/Recruiting,” one officer focused on LGBTQ matters and another working on community outreach, according to Sean Murtha, public information officer with the Worcester Police Department.
The department’s most recent academy class had 32 total recruits — 18 of which were people of color. According to 2024 population estimates, Worcester’s population is 58% white.
“The WPD is aware of the discrepancy between the demographics of the population of the City of Worcester and the demographics of the serving officers within the Worcester Police Department,” Murtha said in an email. “The fortunate news is that recent WPD police academies have been very diverse, but there is still much more work to be done.”
Maintaining diversity
Boston, the state’s largest city, has avoided significant backsliding since being exempted from the Castro decree in 2003, maintaining a similar level of racial parity from when it was under the decree’s requirements.
In a conference touting the city’s crime statistics in December, Mayor Michelle Wu highlighted the city’s diverse cadet classes and recruitment philosophy. Wu said the city has been focused on outreach and recruitment efforts in neighborhoods often overlooked in the city’s public service departments.
“More community members are able to see their own stories reflected in the Boston Police Department at all levels of leadership,” Wu told GBH News. “We’re going to keep doubling down on that.”
Wu said that partnering with several law enforcement affinity groups, like the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement, or MAMLEO, has been pivotal in Boston’s police recruiting efforts.
Jeffrey Lopes is president of the MAMLEO and an officer with the Boston Police Department. He said that consent decrees played a crucial role in promoting accountability while also implementing true systematic reform.
With the Castro decrees gone in Massachusetts, the goal now for MAMLEO is to ensure that accountability within police departments doesn’t slip away, Lopes said. With all the positive work over the past five decades, it would be a disservice to the commonwealth to backtrack, he said.
Consent decrees were a tool for police departments to operate in a manner that “respects the rights of everyone that’s looking to get into policing,” he said.
But Lopes says that systemic reforms, like the consent decrees, should remain in place.
“I hope to see something in the future that really comes in to protect civil rights within policing, ensuring that there is accountability in the hiring process,” he said.
