The request, filed pursuant to the state’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA), was made after the State Police announced it had completed its review of the incident and found that the officer in question behaved appropriately. In their APRA request, the groups noted that they are not calling the report’s conclusion into question, but consider it important that the public be able to understand the report’s finding and see all the evidence used to reach this conclusion.
The public interest in both the incident and subsequent investigation is clear, the groups stated, pointing to the extensive media coverage of the incident, the subsequent student protests, and the important policy issues the incident raised. In requesting the release of the documents, the groups noted that in August the State Police voluntarily released a detailed report into the Cranston Police Department and its “Ticketgate” scandal.
“Like that report, release of this information would shed light on important government issues, and particularly the role, responsibilities and powers of school resource officers in the schools,” the groups stated. By releasing this information, the groups noted, the State Police would be acting in line with an October 20 memo released by Governor Gina Raimondo’s office that emphasized the importance of state agencies disclosing information under APRA whenever possible.
“In balancing the public’s right to know versus any general privacy interests, we clearly believe the public interest is paramount in this instance,” the groups stated. Recognizing the need to protect the privacy of some individuals whose statements contributed to the report, the groups reminded the State Police that APRA provides for the redaction of those names and other personally identifying information rather than withholding the records.
ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown said: “Release of the State Police report and materials is critical to promoting transparency and the public’s right to know in understanding this controversial incident that brought to light the many serious concerns raised by the routine presence of police officers in schools”
Martha Yager, program coordinator for the AFSC – SENE, said today: “I find it disturbing that it is deemed acceptable for a police officer to slam a child to the floor in school and arrest him. When a young person is loud and angry, should not the response be to patiently defuse the situation? Are not schools among the places we should teach children how to deal with their anger and distress? Why are children arrested when no law is broken? We need these documents to get a better handle on how to change a system that criminalizes children at school.”
NAACP Providence Branch President Jim Vincent added: “Although the police officer in question was cleared, the NAACP Providence Branch finds the use of force on a 14-year-old child very disturbing and calls into question whether police officers should be in schools in the first place.”
After the October incident at Tolman High School, the ACLU called on all school districts that currently have school resource officers to re-evaluate their use in the schools and to revise the agreements they have with police departments that set out their job responsibilities.
A copy of the APRA letter is available here: http://riaclu.org/images/uploads/Tolman_High_School_State_Police_APRA.pdf
From an ACLU press release
More reading:
risp.ri.gov 1
riag.ri.gov 1
ride.ri.gov 1
mhrh.ri.gov 3
narragansettri.gov 1
The local agencies named so far, and I should stress that the accuracy of this data has not been confirmed, (though at least one celebrity, Josh Duggar, has been outed with what looks like a high degree of confidence,) include the Rhode Island State Police, the Rhode Island State Attorney General’s Office, the Rhode Island Department of Education, three accounts from the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (formerly the Rhode Island Department of Mental Health, Retardation & Hospitals) and the official government site of Narragansett, RI.
Ashley Madison is an online dating service, headquartered in Canada, aimed at people who are married or in committed relationships. Its slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.” Hackers stole the data and demanded that the site be shut down, or the data would be released. The released data, according to experts consulted by the , appears to be real.
This might have been a purely prurient story of no real relevance, the private lives of individuals should remain just that, private. However, the use of government email accounts makes this of interest to voters. Should government workers be using their work emails to potentially cheat on their spouses?
We’ll see what happens as this story unfolds.
]]>In a letter sent to city councilors Tuesday, ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown noted that while the RISP report was thorough, it focused on a handful of discrete, and largely internal, matters. Further investigation is warranted, the letter argued, because “the public deserves to know whether the improper actions so thoroughly documented in this report were, somewhat incredibly, the only such abuses to take place, or whether there were other unknown victims of these violations of the public trust.”
According to the RISP report, former police chief Marco Palombo not only hired private investigators to conduct surveillance of two police officers, but also briefly spied on a contract civilian computer technician. That spying also entailed police improperly accessing a DMV database to obtain information about the technician. The ACLU letter notes that “if police misused their access to state databases for one political purpose, the reasonable question naturally arises whether this was the only time such databases were misused.” As for surveillance of civilians in addition to the technician, another city employee alleged she too had been the subject of police surveillance. Though the RISP report was unable to substantiate her suspicions, Brown noted that under the circumstances, her concerns “cannot be dismissed out of hand either.”
The ACLU’s letter also pointed to RISP findings that police officials “improperly sought” search warrants for phone records of two targeted employees, and that the affidavits “appeared to be misleading to the Court.” At about the same time, Brown noted, a Rhode Island judge, ruling in a completely unrelated criminal case, sharply criticized Cranston police for, among other things, submitting warrant affidavits that contained “false statements that were deliberate or made in reckless disregard for the truth.” Many of the “dubious practices” cited by the Court, states the letter, “seem eerily similar to some contained in the State Police report.”
These examples lend credence to the possibility that the documented “questionable activities used against fellow officers may have seeped into police activities against non-officers.” As a result, the ACLU letter called it “essential that further investigations be conducted to see if any of these troubling, and potentially unlawful, practices were utilized against others in instances unrelated to Ticketgate and the internal power struggles examined by the report.
The ACLU noted, as the State Police did, that the vast majority of police officers in the Cranston Police Department should not be judged by the bad actions of a few. At the same time, the RISP findings “may represent part of a broader pattern of police misconduct that cannot and should not be ignored lest it unintentionally promote a culture of indifference to basic civil rights that may continue to sprout in other contexts.”
As a result, Brown urged the City Council to “demand answers as to whether the police department, with or without the knowledge of the Mayor, may have engaged in other questionable activities against city residents since 2009, whether it was through improper surveillance, misuse of state databases, or other questionable undertakings such as those that have now been documented.”
This piece is based on a RI ACLU press release.
]]>