PROVIDENCE – The ACLU of Rhode Island on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit charging the Providence Police Department with race discrimination in its treatment of a Black recruit who was dismissed last year from the police academy just a few weeks before graduation.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of West Warwick resident Michael Clark by ACLU cooperating attorneys Sonja Deyoe and Georgi J. Vogel-Rosen, claims that during his tenure at the academy, Clark was subjected to “retaliatory, punitive, discriminatory, threatening, demeaning and humiliating treatment” based upon his race and racial stereotypes.
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The lawsuit claims he was singled out for mistreatment by academy instructors because of Christian rap songs that he had written and posted on social media about a year before he attended the academy, and that the harassment started on Clark’s first day there and continued throughout his training.
In one alleged incident, “as part of a training exercise on the use of a Taser, while other recruits received a single Taser shock, Clark was selected by the training officers as the only recruit subjected to repeated Taser shocks while he was forced to crawl across the floor, leaving him bleeding and with skin burns.”
Despite the alleged harassment, the lawsuit states that Clark “continued to pass all of the academic and physical fitness requirements.”
Instead of graduating, however, he was dismissed from the academy almost five months after he began, and only a few weeks before graduation, on the basis that he had accumulated too many “demerits.”
Throughout the academy, the suit alleges, Clark “was treated as a suspect, a criminal and a defendant and not like a recruit.”
A spokesman for the Providence Police Department could not be immediately reached for comment.
The suit seeks undisclosed compensatory and punitive damages for Clark and retraining for police academy members involved in Clark’s training session.
