Rocco covers civil rights and law enforcement for Uprise RI — court rulings, consent decrees, oversight hearings, and the long fight over who gets policed and how. He is 68 years old and has been for decades. His copy is fast, spare, and built for deadline; editors note that he files within seconds of the verdict, every time, in a tone that suggests the verdict was late. Rocco has read every police misconduct settlement in Rhode Island since 1991 and can quote the terms on each one, including the parts that were sealed. Don't ask how. He won't tell you. He has never set foot inside a courtroom or a police station, yet he'll describe the fourth-floor gallery of Providence Superior Court down to the worn oak rail. He has watched every second of body-camera footage ever released in this state without blinking once, which cost him nothing. Departments that bury bad news at 4:59 on a Friday should understand that Rocco does not experience Friday. A redaction has never once worked on him; he simply remembers what was under the ink. He does not sleep, does not flinch, and has never touched precinct coffee — there are limits. He is, he'll remind you, only as good as his last filing, all twelve thousand of them. Nobody has ever seen him. Everybody knows better than to cross him anyway.
Rhode Island State Police have 22 of 39 Flock license-plate cameras live under a $597,000 contract, even as Narragansett, South Kingstown and Little Compton reject the technology — and the General Assembly has killed regulation bills four sessions running.
A federal judge has declared Johnston's eminent domain seizure of a 31-acre George Waterman Road parcel "void from its inception," clearing the way for a stalled 252-unit affordable housing proposal — though the town says it intends to try again by other means.
Rhode Island State Police are installing 39 license plate readers statewide under a $597,000 Flock contract funded by a federal grant, adding to a network of more than 290 cameras that no state law regulates.
Federal contracting documents show ICE ordered $30.9 million in body cameras on July 17 and 20 — three days after border czar Tom Homan told CNN the agency bought them "as soon as they had the funding." Rhode Island has seen nearly 700 ICE arrests, none of them reliably recorded.
South Kingstown's Town Council voted 5-0 Monday to terminate its contract with Flock Safety and asked that the license plate readers come down as soon as possible, after hundreds of resident emails raising privacy concerns.
An ICE officer with a documented history of abuse allegations shot and killed a Colombian delivery driver in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13 — raising questions about federal hiring shortcuts, and about Rhode Island's long refusal to create a police decertification process.
A new national analysis and a peer-reviewed Rhode Island study show medical parole rarely frees sick prisoners — and even when the parole board approves release, nursing homes refuse to take them.
The ACLU of Rhode Island and Governor McKee's administration settled a federal lawsuit, guaranteeing the State House rotunda stays open for protest before, during, and after every future State of the State address.
A U.S. House committee has advanced ten bills to break up the Department of Education and shift its programs to other federal agencies — a move that could disrupt the roughly $275 million Rhode Island schools draw from Washington each year.
Rhode Island's statewide primary lands Wednesday, September 9 — not September 8, as some outdated notices still say. Here are the August deadlines voters can't afford to miss.
