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The Rhode Island ACLU has today filed suit against the City of Pawtucket, charging city officials with blatantly violating a state law that restricts random drug testing in the workplace.

Seeking to vindicate the free speech rights of political candidates and their supporters, the ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit challenging a Pawtucket ordinance that bans the posting of political signs on residential property more than 30 days before an election.

The Rhode Island ACLU today filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Pawtucket, charging that the Parks and Recreation Division has, for a number of years, given preferential treatment to parochial schools over public schools in granting permits for the use of city athletics fields. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of seven Pawtucket parents and their children, seeks a court order declaring unconstitutional both the preferential treatment to religious schools and the City’s lack of any objective standards for granting permits for use of the fields.

Cooperating attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island today filed a federal lawsuit against Pawtucket city officials on behalf of five firefighters whose personal lockers at the fire station were searched by police without their knowledge or consent.

For the second time in a year, the ACLU of RI is suing the Pawtucket Police Department for violating their obligations under the state’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA).  Doubling down on their efforts to infringe upon the public’s right to know, the Department has again denied an APRA request for copies of final reports of investigations of alleged police misconduct generated by its Internal Affairs Division (IAD).  The denial comes despite a pending ACLU lawsuit against the Department on virtually identical grounds and despite past RI Supreme Court rulings supporting the public’s access to these types of records.