News & Commentary

Nobody likes getting pulled over by the police, but when even the police officers making the stops are doing it against their will, something is seriously wrong.

In response to recent news reports indicating that some local police departments may be implementing traffic ticket quotas among their ranks, the ACLU of Rhode Island has sent letters to all RI police chiefs reminding them of a state law, enacted in 2010, that specifically prohibits this practice.  The ACLU is also considering legal action on behalf of affected motorists.

After failing to provide court-ordered reports for August and September on the status of its efforts to ensure the timely provision of food stamp assistance to needy families, the state Department of Human Services has released a report for October, and the results, the ACLU stated today, are “jaw-dropping” and “demonstrate a continuing and unconscionable crisis affecting the state’s neediest families.” The report shows that some families waited more than a year before getting benefits to which they were entitled. Under federal law, states participating in the food stamp program, known as SNAP, are required to process food stamp applications within thirty days of the date of application, and to provide expedited food stamps to eligible households within seven days. The federally funded program helps put food on the table of Rhode Island’s poorest residents, but since the implementation of the UHIP system, those deadlines have routinely not been met.  Under a court order issued in February in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice (NCLEJ), the state was supposed to have a 96% compliance rate by August in the timely processing of SNAP applications. However, the October figures provided by DHS in a misleadingly rosy manner – since they do not account for pending overdue applications not processed that month – show the timeliness rate hovering at only about 65%, meaning that, even optimistically, one out of every three applicants has still not been getting their applications processed on time.

In recognition that a large backlog of food stamp applications causing undue hardship to hundreds of poor residents continues to exist, the ACLU of Rhode Island today announced it was re-staffing a telephone hotline for people to call if they are having trouble with their SNAP (food stamp) application getting processed in a timely manner due to the state’s year-long UHIP computer fiasco. The hotline number is 1-877-231-7171.

Today the open government coalition ACCESS/RI wrote a letter to Town Council President Suzanne McGee Cienki asking her to cancel tonight’s meeting. ACCESS/RI believes the agenda for tonight’s meeting, specifically the item to ratify retroactively “all” the decisions of the Town Manager, violates the OMA requirement for public notice. That agenda item is a case of the Council thumbing its nose at the public’s right to know what action the Council is taking.

Saying that many questions remain unanswered, the ACLU of Rhode Island today issued a five page commentary on the Thursday shooting of Joseph Santos by Providence and RI State Police after a high speed chase, precipitated by the belief that the car had a connection to the theft of a police cruiser earlier that morning by an escaped suspect, Donald Morgan. At this point, no connection between the two incidents has been established.

Where were you a year ago? We were digesting the election results and hoping that the Trump presidency wouldn’t be based on the same hateful ideas that made up much of his campaign.  By February, we had stopped hoping and were hard at work trying to protect Rhode Island’s immigrant communities.  And that was just the beginning of what has been a challenging year for our founding principles.  We have been VERY busy – both challenging federal threats to our rights, and working to safeguard and expand justice in the Ocean State in response to those threats. Here’s a look at a sample month-by-month snippet of what we have been up to in resisting the Trump anti-civil rights agenda:

Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island, today issued the following statement in response to U.S. District Judge William Smith’s  appointment of retired attorney Deming Sherman as a special master to oversee the resolution of the State’s ongoing problems with UHIP:

The ACLU of Rhode Island today sued the RI State Police (RISP) for abusing their power by retaliating against Marissa Lacoste, 25, a Warwick resident who declined to serve as an informant for the agency in an ongoing criminal investigation. Specifically, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court by ACLU of RI cooperating attorney James W. Musgrave, RISP relied on a dubious state law to bar Lacoste from continuing to work as a cocktail waitress at Twin River Casino in Lincoln when she bowed out of assisting RISP as an informant.