PROVIDENCE – The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island Inc. on Monday filed an open records request with all 39 police departments across the state in response to a report detailing discriminatory training courses some officers may have received out of state.
The report, filed by the New Jersey state comptroller, indicates that some Rhode Island-based police officers participated in privately run training courses during a six-day conference in Atlantic City, N.J., in 2021 that promoted the use of unconstitutional policing tactics for motor vehicle stops and included blatantly discriminatory and offensive comments about women and people of color.
The report documents how instructors at the conference – which was supposedly representative of the company’s training sessions generally – encouraged the almost-1,000 attendees from across the country, including Rhode Island, to rely on a wide array of innocent conduct as grounds to pull over drivers for traffic stops and searches.
The conference, the report documented, also “included over 100 discriminatory and harassing remarks by speakers and instructors, with repeated references to speakers’ genitalia, lewd gestures and demeaning quips about women and minorities.”
The report provides dozens of examples of discriminatory conduct, including an instructor flashing a photo of a monkey while telling participants about his interaction with a 75-year-old Black man, and instructors’ use of words such as “retard” and “bitch” in describing people. The conference also provided attendees a “Reasonable Suspicion Factors Checklist” that listed completely innocent behavior as grounds for pulling over drivers, such as drivers and passengers conversing but looking forward instead of at each other, and motorists indicating turns “way too soon” or “[w]aiting until the very end to turn signal on.”
“The New Jersey report is eye-opening and extraordinarily disturbing. Rhode Islanders deserve to know which police departments sent officers, however unwittingly, to learn how to engage in unconstitutional traffic stops and searches, and whether steps will be taken to retrain them,” said ACLU of Rhode Island Executive director Steven Brown. “This revelation only highlights the crucial need for the General Assembly to reinstate the law mandating the collection and review of traffic stop and search data, passage of which has been stymied by law enforcement for four years despite the clear need for its revival.”
Rhode Island was among the states listed that paid for officers to attend one or more of these trainings, but the report did not indicate how many or which police departments had done so.
The ACLU last week sent a letter to the R.I. Police Officers Commission on Standards and Training, asking for the panel to “determine which police departments paid for and sent officers to any of this company’s trainings, to make the results of your investigation public, and to take affirmative steps to retrain any officers who attended the seminars and were provided improper and unconstitutional training.”
However, the commission demurred, claiming such an investigation was out of its jurisdiction, prompting the ACLU’s open-records requests to 39 police departments to find out which of them participated.
