Kilmartin – RI Future

April 13, 2016April 13, 2016

Kilmartin asks 10 retail chain stores if they use on-call scheduling

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Attorney General Peter Kilmartin sent letters to 10 retail chain companies that do business in Rhode Island to warn them against and request information about what is known as on call scheduling.

On-call scheduling, or on-call shifts, is the employer practice of informing employees the day of a work shift if they are needed or not. Kilmartin sent letters to: Justice Just for Girls, American Eagle Outfitters, Carters, Inc., Coach, Inc., Forever 21, Aeropostale, Inc., Pacific Sunwear of California, Inc., Payless ShoeSource, Inc., Vans VF Corp., and Zumiez, Inc.

“Such unpredictable work schedules take a toll on employees,” said each letter [Click here to read a letter]. “Our letter today is prompted by the concerns outlined above and by our shared interest in the well being of workers nationwide. Because we have reason to believe [enter name of business] maybe using this methodology for scheduling, we would like to know about your use of ‘on call shifts.'”

The letters request scheduling information from the 10 companies, as well as if the businesses have analyzed the “actual affect of ‘on call shifts’ on the productivity or well-being of its employees.”

The Rhode Island Fair Workweek Coalition applauded Kilmartin’s action.

“For too long, scheduling practices like on-call shifts have given employees virtually no warning that their shift is about to start, forcing them to make impossible choices between keeping their job and being able to schedule childcare, look after an aging parent, or keep a doctor’s appointment,” the group said in a statement. “It is simply unfair to give workers so little control over their own lives. We applaud Attorney General Kilmartin and other states for taking a strong stand against policies that should have no place in today’s economy.”

Kilmartin took the action in conjunction with attorneys general from seven other states and the District of Columbia, who also sent out similar letters.

“A majority of retailers no longer use on-call shifts, as they recognize the practice in unfair to employees who must keep their day free, arrange for child care needs, and give up the chance to get another job or attend a class – often all for nothing,” said Kilmartin in a news release. “It is our hope that these remaining retailers will follow suit and end this unjust method of scheduling work hours.”

According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, the movement against on-call scheduling took root last year when the New York attorney general sent a similar letter to 14 retail chains. “Last year, New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, sent similar requests to 14 retail chains, including Target Corp. and Gap Inc.,” according to the WSJ article. “Not long after, Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch Co., and L Brands Inc.’s Bath & Body Works announced that they would discontinue the practice. The letters sent Tuesday state that on-call scheduling doesn’t appear to be a business necessity, given that a number of retailers don’t use the method.”

May 7, 2015May 7, 2015

Bill would limit police searches of pedestrians, minors

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The House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on the Comprehensive Community Police Relations Act, (CCPRA) H5819, a bill that seeks to combat racial profiling by requiring “all police departments to submit to the Office of Highway Safety an annual report indicating what action has been taken to address any racial disparities in traffic stops and/or searches.”

The act would also prohibit police officers from asking juveniles and adult pedestrians if they will consent to be searched. Right now, a police officer who lacks probable cause to conduct a search is allowed to ask permission to search pockets and backpacks. Preventing police officers from asking for permission to conduct searches of citizens who present no probable cause protects juveniles from being intimidated into giving assent.

The bill under consideration is the culmination of at least 12 years of effort on behalf of community organizations and members of law enforcement. Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré helped craft the bill in a way that would satisfy a wide range of concerns. The meetings were held in an open and forthright manner and anyone was welcome to join in.

Why then does Attorney General Peter Kilmartin‘s office oppose the bill?

Special Assistant Attorney General Joee Lindbeck testified that the AG’s office opposes the bill because it would require police officers to ask permission to search juveniles. She also said that the Attorney General’s office was not privy to the meetings between law enforcement and community group’s where the bill was put together.

Under questioning from Representative Edie Ajello, Lindbeck admitted that under current law, a police officer without probable cause cannot ask for consent to search your automobile, but is allowed to ask for consent to search an adult pedestrian or juvenile. Doesn’t this, asked Ajello, protect the privacy of automobile drivers more than the privacy of adult pedestrians and juveniles?

“That is a position you could take, I believe,” replied Lindbeck.

Michael Évora, director of the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights, took issue with the Attorney General’s position on the bill. The bill does not prohibit a police officer from searching an adult pedestrian or juvenile if there is probable cause. It only prevents a police officer from asking for permission if there is not probable cause. This does not amount to a public safety issue, as Lindbeck asserted, said Évora.

Évora also took issue with the idea that the Attorney General’s office was somehow unaware of or not able to attend the meetings between community organizations and law enforcement officials where the bill was painstakingly crafted. “The meetings were always open,” said Évora. Further, Évora maintains that Commissioner Paré and Attorney General Kilmartin met weekly on a variety of issues, and that Kilmartin was surely informed about the content of the bill. “It is disingenuous at best,” said Évora, “to say the Attorney General was not aware.”

Speaker after speaker addressed the necessity and immediacy of the CCPRA.

Jim Vincent of the RI NAACP spoke of the importance of this legislation in building some sense of trust between communities of color and the police. “There is no need for a Rhode Island name,” said Vincent, “to be added to the long list of young men and women who have needlessly lost their lives due to police violence.”

“If we have hopefully learned anything from the outbreaks in Ferguson, Cleveland, Staten Island and of course the recent unrest in Baltimore,” said Jordan Seaberry, chairman of the Univocal Legislative Minority Advisory Commission, “it is that we cannot afford to avoid the question of race in our society.”

Seaberry went on to say that the legislators in the General Assembly “are tasked with creating the conditions for Rhode Islanders to prosper.”

“As long as racial profiling exists, we in fact are dooming families, neighborhoods [and] communities to [the] fringes. We cannot have prosperity without equity.”

Ray Watson, director of the Mt. Hope Community Center was offended that the Attorney General’s office would suggest that the process of developing the bill was not open and inclusive. He was doubly offended that the rights of juveniles were held to a lower standard than the rights of automobile owners.

Prompted by Rep. Edie Ajello, Watson spoke about being stopped and searched by the police, and the effect police harrassment has on young people of color. “It gets to a point that when you’re a youth and you’re out in the community, I mean, there’s only so much your parents can do to protect you. So you get to a point where you’re like, ‘you know what, as long as I didn’t get arrested or I didn’t hurt it’s fine’ but it definitely breeds resentment towards law enforcement.”

In compelling testimony, Ann DeCosta spoke of her concern for her 23 year old son, a recent graduate of the University of Rhode Island. The problems of raising a child are multiplied when raising a young man of color in this society, says DeCosta, “From a young age I taught my child, if you get separated from me, if you are hurt, if you need assistance, look for that badge… that’s the person you need to trust.”

But, when her son got older, and went to URI, her son told her that, “he gets stopped, 3 or 4 times a month in North Kingstown and Narragansett… I find this very upsetting… Everyone in the car is asked for ID, sometimes they’re pulled out of the car and searched for reasons such as having an air freshener hanging from the mirror…”

When Eugene Montero sent his son to the store for some milk in Coventry, his son was stopped by a police officer and told to turn out his pockets because he “fit the description” of someone selling drugs. When Montero called the police station to complain about his son’s treatment, the police had no record of the incident. “What I’m sad to say,” said Montero, “is that my kids have had several incidents since moving back to Rhode Island. My two boys who are now grown, have moved. They live in Florida.”

When Mike Araujo was 14 years old, he was beaten “very badly” by a police officer. “I had my skull split. I had my eye orbit broken. I had my jaw broken. My fingers broken. He broke my ankle. I remember that he stepped on my knees to prevent me from standing up.”

When Araujo became an adult, he tried to look into the beating he had endured. “When I looked into the record, I found it was really hard to find my own name. I finally found it, it was ‘African American male, approximately 18,’ (I was 14), ‘resisted arrest on Westminster St.'”

As these stories show, presently there is little to know accountability. Without the police keeping accurate records of all stops and searches, there is no way to introduce policies to curb abuses and racism. The Comprehensive Community Police Relations Act would be a great start in the right direction.

March 12, 2015March 12, 2015

Mandatory minimum for DUI homicides wrong way to enforce law

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Atty. Gen. Kilmartn’s recent proposal that vehicular homicide should bring a minimum 30-year sentence strikes me as a bad idea.

People who kill with their cars while intoxicated deserve severe punishment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that higher sentencing guidelines are what will work to prevent deaths. If tomorrow it was announced that I could watch a drunk driver be dangled by his or her ankles from the top of the Superman Building, I’d be out at Kennedy Plaza with my lawn chair to see the debacle. As cathartic as that might be, though, there are better ways to approach the issue.

The Ocean State was a leader in ending the death penalty, and we should recognize as a culture that severe punishment is less important than consistent punishment.

Rhode Island suffers from a serious DUI problem. It’s ahead of its New England peers–in the sense of more drunk driving, not better policy–and needs desperately to do something about the problem. But the U.S. approach of using prison to deal with any social problem is a failed one that we should reconsider. The places that lead on road safety don’t share our views about imprisonment.

In the Netherlands, which boasts some of the safest streets in the world, prison is a last resort. The Netherlands impounds people’s cars much more easily and for much longer periods of time than the U.S. The response to driver offenses is swift and sure in the Netherlands, to be sure: people lose their licenses for much less than vehicular homicide there. What would be considered baseline Rhode Island driving technique–speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians–is considered a serious breech of public safety in the Netherlands and not tolerated. People are arrested for such behavior, but from there the focus is less on competing for longer and longer sentences than it is on keeping irresponsible people away from cars, fining them for their behavior, and moving on.

The Netherlands has such a low imprisonment rate that it’s renting out empty cells to inmates from other Scandinavian countries.

Motor vehicle fatalities declined from 65 in 2013 to 52 in 2014, all time low but still 52 fatalities too many.

— Peter Kilmartin (@AGKilmartin) March 11, 2015

I have nothing but respect for Atty. Gen. Kilmartin’s proposal. In Rhode Island, many of our lawmakers treat DUIs as a joke. So much is this the case that we made it to Last Week Tonight for the flippant and disrespectful behavior of State Senators Ciccone and Ruggiero related to a drunk driving and shoplifting incident:

What should Rhode Island do about drunk or otherwise impaired driving?

Cars should be impounded with a very streamlined process. Driving is a privilege. You abuse it, you lose it. And that doesn’t mean just for homicide, but for offenses like speeding, distracted driving, and failing to yield to vulnerable users. One of the things that strikes me as odd about the 30-year minimum is that it is tied to the act of actually killing someone–a sort of flip of the coin. More modest but more consistent punishments for the act of bad driving itself–with or without killing someone–is more important. A person who doesn’t already consider the 15-year minimum enough to deter their behavior isn’t going to be further deterred by an extra 15 years. The odds have to be increased that a person will be caught, rather than focusing on extreme punishments for the rare cases where someone is caught.
Drivers should be able to lose their licenses very easily, and for very long-term periods of time. A second moving violation (after first receiving a ticket) should result in temporary license suspension of one year. A homicide or serious injury should result in permanent license revocation. Any incident of intoxicated driving–with or without injury–should also result in permanent loss of one’s license. Failing to submit to a breath test should mean permanent loss of one’s license.
The state should use suspended sentencing as a means to enforce behavior of convicts, but should focus on placing irresponsible drivers in jobs and treatment and keeping them away from cars. A focus that is less about prison should not mean that people who are irresponsible can’t get prison time. It just should mean that it isn’t our go-to, even for vehicular homicide. In many European countries, even first degree murder is treated with lighter sentences than what the Atty. Gen. is suggesting for vehicular homicide, and while I agree with him that driving drunk is a conscious choice on par with other types of murder, I think we should think carefully about the fact that these other countries are succeeding in every measure of crime prevention that we’re failing at. It’s not about being soft, it’s about being effective.
The state should make it illegal to operate a bar in a driver-dominated location. I hope that Rhode Island MADD will join the call to fix this design problem. The places which are most successful at combating drunk driving are those which focus on density, transit, walking, and biking as primary means of moving around. Bars do not belong on the sides of fast roads or in low density areas unless they are providing a specific non-motorized way of getting around. Rural or exurban bars can meet this requirement by helping to fund shuttles or safe biking routes for their patrons–this should be a requirement of any liquor license. Municipalities should start placing parking maximums instead of parking minimums on bars–because only a few designated drivers should be expected to arrive by car. In the Netherlands, people drink or even use decriminalized marijuana and then go home safely, because the Dutch don’t build their environments with cars as the first and last option–they’re just as obnoxious as any bar-goer in Warwick but no one is hurt. The owners of bars may respond that providing non-car transportation costs too much in their locations–if that is the case, then they should relocate to denser areas where provision of other options is easier. No exceptions.
RIPTA should also be receiving additional funding to extend its hours late into the night the way the MBTA, MTA, and SEPTA do.
I’ve reported in the past on a tip from a RIDOT safety worker who told me that many municipalities do a poor job of enforcing DUI laws because of the amount of time it takes to book offenders for this offense–five hours. The perception in many locations is that violent crime is a higher concern, but cars actually kill far more people than guns in the United States. The Atty. Gen. should work with communities to find out how this institutionalized bias away from DUI enforcement can be fixed.

We live in a culture that sees prison as the first solution to any criminal problem. Prison is a tool, and should be available as an option for offenders who cannot be controlled by other means. But the design of our communities, the consistency of our enforcement, the standards we have for our drivers’ licenses, and other factors are far more important than blustering over large sentences. I encourage Atty. Gen. Kilmartin to take a different route to solving this serious problem.

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April 16, 2014April 16, 2014

Will RI move forward with recreational pot, or backwards with medical pot

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There are two bills pertaining to pot being heard at the State House tonight. One deals with to recreational use, and would make Rhode Island the third state in the nation to legalize marijuana. Read more about that bill here. The other deals with medical use, and would make it harder for patients and their legal caregivers to grow their own.

The medical marijuana restrictions bill, was introduced at the bequest of Attorney General Peter Kilmartin. A Providence Journal article this morning highlights ways in which the medical marijuana program has been exploited by criminals. Kilmartin’s bill, he says in the article, would reduce these criminal exploitations.

It would also have a great impact on the more than 7,000 patients and 3,500 caregivers in the state’s medical marijuana program.

The bill would reduce the number of plants a patient or caregiver could have from 12 to 3. An average indoor marijuana plant yields about a four ounces and takes at least four months to bring to harvest. The bill also includes “freshly harvested wet marijuana” as “usable” medicine, effectively dramatically reducing the amount of pot a patient or grower can have even though it technically raises the legal weight of permissible pot from 2.5 ounces to 5 ounces.

Kilmartin’s bill would require a local zoning inspection of the grow, and allow local police to inspect the site at any time. It also mandates that a potential patient or caregiver be vetted by the FBI rather than state police.

It would also grant landlords “the discretion not to lease or continue to lease to a cardholder who cultivates marijuana in the leased premises.”

Kilmartin revisions to the state’s medical marijuana law would also eliminate the limit on the number of plants state-sanctioned compassion centers can grow. Currently, these three state-sanctioned businesses can grow up to 99 plants.

February 22, 2013February 22, 2013

New Open Records Law Needs Enforcement

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mike field — Mike Field, of the Attorney General’s office, testifies at a hearing on a proposal to update Rhode Island’s Access to Public Records Act in 2012. (Photo by Bob Plain)

Between 1999 and June 2012, the Attorney General’s office filed lawsuits against public bodies for violating the state’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA) on only six occasions, less than 4% of the time after finding that violations of the law had been committed. That is one of the findings of a report issued today by the ACLU of Rhode Island, which examines past enforcement of the open records law by the AG’s office and urges stronger enforcement in the future.

In June 2012, the General Assembly enacted comprehensive amendments to APRA, and expanded the circumstances for imposing penalties against public bodies that violate the Act. This prompted the ACLU to examine how APRA had been enforced by the Attorney General’s office, the state agency explicitly given enforcement powers under APRA, prior to those amendments.

In addition to the lack of litigation by that office to address violations, we found other discouraging patterns. Among them:

Violations of uncomplicated aspects of the law — such as responding to an open records request within the required time period, notifying requesters of their appeal rights, and not charging unreasonable fees for the inspection and copying of records — occurred repeatedly.

Even the most blatant violations of the statute rarely led to legal action by the Attorney General. In one recent instance, the same public body – the Town of North Providence – was found to have violated APRA six separate times within a two-year period, yet even after the sixth violation, the Attorney General refused to find that the Town had engaged in a “knowing and willful” violation that warranted seeking penalties under the law.

It should be noted that the AG’s failure to pursue vigorous APRA enforcement occurred regardless of who had been in office during the time period studied. And it must be acknowledged that until the 2012 amendments were adopted, the Attorney General faced a high standard – a finding of a “knowing and willful” violation of the law – in order to obtain financial penalties against a public body. But since so many of the violations have been so clear, even this standard should have led to a much stronger track record in pursuing legal action and thereby helping to deter future violations by public bodies.

Under last year’s amendments to the law, a public body can now be subject to financial penalties for “reckless” violations of the law as well as “knowing and willful” ones, which means the complainant need no longer prove that the violation was done with deliberate knowledge of its illegality. In order to promote respect for, and compliance with, the law, it is essential that the AG make use of the statute’s strengthened penalty provisions to seek fines against public bodies that engage in clear violations of APRA’s requirements. It is insufficient to issue findings of APRA violations with no further repercussions when the violations should never have occurred in the first place. A more vigorous response is necessary in order to help reverse a culture of secrecy that seems to pervade too many government agencies.

If little changes, however, the General Assembly should further strengthen the penalty sections of the law by significantly increasing the fines that can be imposed to encourage enforcement by private parties. The General Assembly should also consider whether another state agency should be tasked with the responsibility of enforcing the statute if the AG’s office does not increase its pursuit of violations against recalcitrant agencies. The public’s right to know demands nothing less.

September 5, 2012September 5, 2012

RI Delegation Welcomes a First-Night Speaker

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chafee kilmartin — Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin and Gov. Linc Chafee (Photo by John McDaid)

CHARLOTTE, NC –– The Rhode Island delegation was buzzing this morning over last night’s speeches and events at the Democratic National Convention, and they had a surprise visitor when Gov. Lincoln Chafee stopped by their breakfast.

“We may have our differences back home,” Chafee told the delegates, “But here, we’re all united to support the re-election of Barack Obama”

From inside the hall, last night, probably not visible on tv, the audience response seemed a bit muted when Chafee started off by talking about being a former Republican. But it was evident that the audience warmed up to him almost immediately, and by the end, he got an enthusiastic round of applause.

Asked how he felt the speech went, Chafee told RI Future he was happy to have the opportunity. “Those were some points that I wanted to share with Americans…strong feelings that I’ve had since my time in the Senate.”

But although it was his speech, Chafee was clear that his main mission was supporting the President. “I know conventions, the point is to promote the candidate; I wanted to make sure I did that.”

In addition to a lot of positive words about our our local favorite, delegates were also delighted by the rest of last night’s lineup.

Rep. Frank Ferri thought the whole evening was powerful. “It was great to hear some positive messages,” he said. “Finally, let’s talk about what Obama has accomplished.”

Former gubernatorial candidate Myrth York particularly liked Cory Booker. “Cory was on fire,” she said. And she offered an observation about the picture offfered by the whole evening. “The party is young,” she said. “It has the look and feel of the future

Democratic National Committee member Frank Montanaro was especially moved by the video memorial to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said. “that was worth the show.”

And, of course, there was praise all around for the job that First Lady Michelle Obama did. Speaker Gordon Fox perhaps summed it up best: “Any man who has the sense to marry that woman deserves to be President.”