What Happens After You Report Human Waste in Boston

"Closed" in Boston's 311 system does not mean "resolved." It means the ticket was marked complete — even when the receiving department had no way to act on it or send it to someone who could. For human waste reports, the data tells a stark story:

Many other waste tickets have no closure reason at all — just an empty field and a closed status. The ticket disappears from the queue without any record of what happened.

Boston's 311 app has 162+ ticket types. Not one of them is "human waste," "biohazard," or anything close. When you report feces on the sidewalk, you pick the closest thing you can find: "Requests for Street Cleaning."

That means your biohazard report gets routed to a street sweeper. The crew that shows up isn't equipped for it. The ticket either gets rejected ("BPW does not service human waste") or silently closed.

Other cities have solved this. San Francisco added a "Human or Animal Waste" category in 2008 with a 12–24 hour SLA. Portland routes biohazards to a dedicated team. Boston's 311 system is currently migrating to new software — this is the window to add it.

Here's the routing chain for a human waste report in Boston:

1. Resident reports "feces on sidewalk" via 311 app
2. No matching category → resident selects "Street Cleaning"
3. Ticket goes to Bureau of Public Works (BPW) street sweeping
4. BPW closes it: "does not service human waste on public streets"
5. Some tickets note "sent to outside contractor" — but no contractor ticket is created
6. No department is accountable. No SLA. No follow-up.

Workers who receive these tickets have no way to reroute them. The system gives them one option: close it. The report goes to the wrong team, and the rejection is counted as a resolution. There is no department in Boston's 311 system whose job it is to handle human waste on public streets.

When a report gets closed without action, some residents try again. Same location, same problem, new ticket. These repeat reporters are a signal — they represent the fraction of people frustrated enough to go through the process twice. Most people give up after the first time.

We're building an analysis to detect these "frustration clusters" — locations with multiple reports for the same problem within a short window. Each cluster is evidence of a systemic failure: a place where the city's process isn't working and residents know it.

When you write a description in your 311 report — "human feces on the sidewalk" or "needles in the park near the playground" — that text is the most important part of the record. It's where the real information is.

Boston removes this field entirely from the public data export. The dataset on Analyze Boston includes timestamps, location, department, and closure reason — but the original description is gone. Zero percent of records have it.

The description does exist in a separate system — the Open311 API — but you have to request each ticket individually. There's no bulk endpoint. We enrich targeted records this way for our waste classifier, but it's slow and incomplete.

Without descriptions, anyone analyzing this data — journalists, researchers, the city itself — is working blind. You can't find human waste reports by reading "Requests for Street Cleaning." You need the text the resident wrote.

Even the fields that are published have gaps. In the 2024 street cleaning data (22,539 records):

Category names change over time — "Needle Pickup," "Needle Clean-up," and "Needle Cleanup" are three different strings for the same service. "Encampments" only appears starting in 2025. Our pipeline normalizes these, but any analysis that doesn't will undercount.

Timestamps don't include timezone information. The structured data appears to be in UTC, but closure notes include Eastern time. Without conversion, it looks like Boston's peak 311 reporting hour is 4 AM — which makes no sense. After converting to Eastern, the peak shifts to late morning. Our pipeline now handles this conversion, but any downstream consumer of the raw data who doesn't know about the offset will get wrong results.

The Open311 API at boston2-production.spotmobile.net — the same one we use to retrieve stripped descriptions — returns reporter names, email addresses, and phone numbers when queried with ?extensions=true. No API key required. Anyone who knows the endpoint can access it.

We do not store, display, or use any personal information. Our pipeline reads only the description field for classification. But the fact that PII is openly accessible is a privacy issue the city should address.

Every number on this site is an undercount. Records without coordinates get dropped. Reports filed under wrong categories get missed. Descriptions that would help classification are stripped from the public data. "Closed" doesn't mean "resolved." And there's no way to know how many people saw a problem, thought about reporting it, and didn't bother.

These aren't obscure technical bugs — they're design choices that make it impossible to see how the city handles human waste on public streets. The data exists. The infrastructure exists. What's missing is the configuration and the accountability.

We publish our methodology and source code so you can verify everything here. If you find something we got wrong, let us know.