PROVIDENCE – The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island has filed a complaint against the Narragansett Police Department for refusing to release any copies of its final investigations of complaints of police misconduct, the ACLU announced.
The complaint was filed with the state’s attorney general’s office on March 5 by ACLU of R.I. cooperating attorney James Cullen on behalf of Dimitri Lyssikatos, a member of the Rhode Island Accountability Project.
Last September, Lyssikatos filed an open-records request for misconduct-investigation reports from the police department. In response, the department “claimed all internal affairs reports were confidential, despite R.I. Supreme Court decisions … that have held to the contrary,” according to a news release.
The ACLU complaint also targets a 2017 Access to Public Records Act advisory opinion by the attorney general’s office in the case of Piskunov vs. Town of Narragansett. The opinion said the Narragansett Police Department could withhold their final reports of misconduct investigations if they were initiated internally as opposed to citizen-generated.