Defending the Law in Rhode Island

Photo illustration: Emily Rietzel/Getty Images.

The evening was warm, but the crowd’s mood  was hotter. The United States Supreme Court had just upended the fifty-year precedent protecting a woman’s right to an abortion. On June 24, 2022, reproductive rights supporters rallied on the State House steps to decry the decision.

Jennifer Rourke, a Democratic party activist, had just finished speaking when a knot of angry people began to form around a counterprotester. Rourke persuaded the man to leave, but another rallygoer thought he would punctuate her words with his fists. Videos captured parts of the ensuing melee, including the moment when off-duty Providence police officer Jeann Lugo — unidentified — struck Rourke in the head. This is a fact upon which everyone agreed.

But everything else was in dispute: how he hit her — open handed or closed fist? Why he hit her — did she grab his arm as he tried to break up a fight? And, more importantly, what should be the appropriate consequences of that blow? Rourke pressed charges, but Lugo was acquitted of simple assault that November. Former Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements wanted to fire Lugo, but the officer requested a hearing under the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights. In April 2023, a panel of three police officers representing management, Lugo and a neutral adjudicator ruled that Lugo should receive a ten-day suspension. Lugo’s attorney Carly Iafrate declared after the hearing that the “process worked exactly as it should have.”

Rourke, who testified to her version of events, says “[The hearing] was hard because they kept showing the video over and over again, and I wasn’t allowed to bring an attorney. I walked out and cried. If I was to assault a police officer, I’d be in a ton of trouble. Where do we get our justice?”

The incident became the impetus for a final push to overhaul the state’s LEOBOR law for the first time since it was enacted forty-eight years ago. The new law, passed last spring, establishes a five-member hearing committee consisting of three “qualified and randomly selected” law enforcement officers, a retired judge and an attorney selected in consultation with the state Supreme Court’s committee on racial and ethnic fairness and the Rhode Island Bar Association’s committee on diversity, equity and inclusion. It creates two levels of summary suspensions, from five days for lesser offenses to fourteen days for major infractions, and permits police chiefs to make public statements and release video evidence for all but minor
infractions. It also requires that information relating to pending hearings be published online.

The bill’s final version emerged in June from negotiations among lawmakers, unions, municipal officials, chiefs and press advocates, who won a last-minute amendment ensuring that all police-worn body camera footage can be made public through public records requests.

Senate President Dominick Ruggerio and House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi say this reform ushers in more accountability. The Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association is satisfied that it strengthens an administrator’s ability to mete out appropriate discipline. 

“The biggest piece is the ability to speak directly on the status of an officer for criminal investigations,” says retired Little Compton Police Chief Sid Wordell, RIPCA’s executive director. “The community cannot have trust in their law enforcement agents to do the right thing if there’s not [transparency.]”

None of the four unions representing Rhode Island police officers responded to requests for comment.

The Rhode Island ACLU and the Rhode Island Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Caucus say the reform does not go far enough.

“The scope of protection that it provides police is extraordinary, not only compared with other government employees, but even with the rights of criminal defendants,” says Steven Brown of the RI ACLU.

The RIBLIAP caucus is disappointed that a provision permitting a chief to directly discipline or fire, under the terms of the union contract, an officer who violates department rules in deadly force incidents was not seriously considered. 

“The leadership likes to say that the community was involved, but our concerns were never taken into account,” says state Representative Leonela Felix (D-Pawtucket).

Nonetheless, it was a rare ebb in the job protections unique to police. Twenty-two states have some version of a LEOBOR law, according to the National Police Accountability Project. They began to appear in the 1970s, after U.S. Supreme Court rulings limiting the actions of prosecutors and investigators in disciplinary proceedings. They also followed the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, when “there was a real attempt to professionalize policing by the progressive police chiefs’ movement,” says Lauren Bonds, executive director of the NPAP. “And that is when you see police unions getting organized to push back and create additional protections for officers.”

LEOBOR laws have spread nationwide over the last half-century in response to periodic calls for police reform following high-profile incidents, she says. 

Concerns about suing government officials go back 150 years, says UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, author of Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable. Proponents still argue that without legal protections, government officials would not do their jobs rigorously — or take such jobs at all. Over time, she says, laws and court decisions have created formidable obstacles for plaintiffs seeking accountability from alleged harm caused by police officers at every stage of litigation. 

“All of these barriers to relief are justified by concerns that are overstated or just plain false,” she says.

The state’s foremost LEOBOR experts, a handful of attorneys who have represented management or the rank-and-file police officer for decades, say the prereform system worked fairly well.

“Even in the termination cases, it frequently is not a two-to-one decision. Most of the time, the vote is three to zero,” says defense attorney Joseph F. Penza Jr. 

Attorney Vincent F. Ragosta Jr., who has prosecuted LEOBOR cases for municipalities, agrees, adding he fears the new system will be more cumbersome and lopsided in favor of the accused.

“The current process is imbalanced enough,” he says. “Depending on [who] the panel picks, this could be far worse.”

In Rhode Island, LEOBOR makes headlines when its protections are extended in alleged misconduct cases that seem to be — to the average citizen — obvious breaches of duty, if not common sense. 

In 2021, former Pawtucket police officer Daniel Dolan was off duty in his pickup truck when he pursued a car into the parking lot of a pizza shop for speeding. The three teenagers in the car tried to drive away. Dolan testified that he shot into the vehicle after it bumped him, wounding the driver in the arm. Dolan was suspended with pay. But after a jury acquitted him in January of felony assault charges, Pawtucket was compelled, under LEOBOR, to reimburse him for back pay. 

Dolan requested a LEOBOR hearing but resigned during the proceeding. 

Under the new law, the same set of facts could produce the same result. An officer can’t be terminated until the criminal case is adjudicated, and the officer can still challenge the termination. An acquittal would still compel a city to pay the officer’s lost wages. 

Providence Representative Jose Batista and Harrison Tuttle, president of the Black Lives Matter Rhode Island Political Action Committee, vow to fight for a total repeal. It’s not an impossible goal — in 2022, Maryland repealed its LEOBOR law.

“I think the public’s biggest concern when an officer has committed an act of misconduct, particularly around excessive force, there is a sense of — not only among people of color — uneasiness that this is something that is systemic,” says Tuttle.

Suzette Cook has lived it. In March 2013, her son Joshua Robinson was beaten by Providence police officers during a traffic stop, according to a civil lawsuit filed in 2016. The lawsuit against Providence Police Sergeant David D. Allen, officer Christopher Ziroli and seven others alleges excessive force, assault, battery, false arrest and malicious prosecution. Robinson, who was charged with assault and resisting arrest, was convicted in a bench trial and spent three months in prison. In 2017, he appealed his conviction in Superior Court.  

The police maintained that Robinson’s injuries were the result of a violent struggle. (Robinson is four-foot-eleven.) Allen testified that he saw Robinson stuff bags of crack cocaine in his mouth, but no drugs were found at the scene or in his body.
A jury acquitted Robinson; in 2019, the city settled with him for $72,500, but admitted no liability. If any officer suffered a professional consequence, Cook doesn’t know about it. Her son, on the other hand, is still living with the ordeal.

“Now Josh is thirty and he’s not that interactive young man that he used to be — always having somebody laugh, joke, and just having fun. That’s not him anymore,” she says. “Joshua came out of it with his life. But the damage is done, and the police don’t care.” 

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Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than two decades.