Total Paper Citations Dropped by Roughly Half From July to October
The rollout of electronic citation capability to municipal police departments in Massachusetts is just about complete, according to the head of the state agency responsible for maintaining driver violation records.
Merit Rating Board Director Sonja Singleton said Tuesday that 321 of the 351 local police departments are now using so-called e-citations instead of solely paper citations, as well as the Massachusetts State Police.
Three more municipal law enforcement agencies are undergoing training before launching e-citations, Singleton said, at which point she believes “everyone that was going to roll out with e-citations has been rolled out with e-citations.”
“We’ll continue to work with those police departments that are submitting paper [citations],” she told the Merit Rating Board’s members at a meeting.
Electronic citations appear to represent a growing chunk of total citations issued over the course of the fall.
While the total number of citations varied by month, the share that were issued electronically landed between 80 percent and 83 percent for most of 2024, then climbed to 84 percent in September and 88 percent in October.
One member of the Merit Rating Board, Glenn Kaplan, asked for more insight into why total paper citations dropped by roughly half from July to October and electronic citations also declined by a smaller margin.
“Where did those extra citations go? One might have thought there’d be a similar uptick on electronic if that was happening, if a lot of this was that people were shifting,” Kaplan, who works as chief of the insurance and financial services division in the attorney general’s office, said.
Singleton said there’s a “fluctuation that occurs each month that’s non-relative” to the embrace of e-citations, and added that she would take a closer look at the data.
