Findings

Has the Supervisor of Records stopped ordering disclosure?

Not exactly. After the 2017 reform of the Public Records Law, the rate at which the Supervisor ordered agencies to release records jumped from roughly fifteen percent to nearly half of all decided appeals. That rate has held — but it is wobbly, and 2025 was the worst post-reform year on record.

Updated 2026-05-04 · n = 30,800 orders · 2026 figures are year-to-date

Share of appeals where the Supervisor ordered disclosure

Y axis: % ordered

The full distribution of dispositions

Across all 30,800 orders, less than half end with the Supervisor ordering disclosure. About a third close procedurally because the agency provided some response during the appeal — without the Supervisor reaching the merits.

How appeals end

All 30,800 orders, 2014–2026 ytd

Disposition	Cases	Share
Records ordered released	13,620	44.2%
Closed: agency responded mid-appeal	10,238	33.2%
Fee or time petition granted to agency	1,799	5.8%
Closed on other procedural grounds	1,248	4.1%
Withholding upheld	271	0.9%
Supervisor declined to opine	471	1.5%
No clear outcome (under study)	3,106	10.1%

The 10.1% no-outcome residual is being studied. Most of these are appeals where the disposition phrasing eluded the current classifier. They are flagged for human and secondary-classifier review — and become the next regex iteration cycle.

The agencies most often asking to charge for redaction

One agency dominates the docket: the MBTA, which files fee petitions at 1.5 times the rate of the next-most-frequent custodian. Many of these are templated security-segregation petitions under G.L. c. 66, § 10(d)(iv).

Top fee-petition filers

2014–2026 ytd

Rank	Custodian	Filings
1	MBTA	144
2	Dartmouth Police Department	96
3	MassDOT	73
4	Malden Public Schools	64
5	City of Framingham	46
6	City of Worcester	42
7	Medford Police Department	36
7	Department of Public Utilities	36
9	City of Malden	36
10	Massachusetts State Police	32

The most-appealed custodians

Top appeal targets

All appeal types, 2014–2026 ytd

Rank	Custodian	Appeals
1	City of Boston — Public Records	895
2	Boston Police Department	864
3	Massachusetts State Police	737
4	MBTA	550
5	MassDOT	519
6	Department of State Police	512
7	Town of Weymouth — Town Clerk	498
8	City of Worcester	347
9	Department of Correction	289
10	Dept. of Elementary & Secondary Ed.	283

What we're watching for next

The headline number — share of appeals ordered to release — is only the start. The classifier is being extended to catch finer-grained patterns: doctrinal-avoidance maneuvers, recurring stalled matters, agency petition strategies.

Each new sub-classifier is published with its precision against a labeled holdout. The full methodology is open for inspection.

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