Law and Order
It’s difficult to know whether to read this Lauren Clem story in the Valley Breeze as a comedy or outrage-driven drama. Ronald Landry worked his way up to the rank of captain in the Woonsocket police department, retiring in 2007. At that point, presumably, he took his pension along with a promotion of chief just across…
Thus, John DePetro is keeping an eye on the folks at the heart of the scandal with the Sayles Street police response: One of the main players in the Providence Sayles street melee was arrested in Cranston for dealing drugs with children in the house. Alynezea Quaranta was one of the main contributors to the…
Although the case does not appear to be concluded in a final way, Superior Court Judge Susan McGuirl has dismissed a lawsuit by Bill Felkner against Rhode Island College, which he filed in 2007 after finding the social work department to be biased against him for his conservative beliefs. Just the fact that this case…
Did you hear Governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation speech? If not, you may wish to take an antiemetic before listening to it. (Transcript here.) His voice quavered with “emotion” at several points during the speech. “I have slipped …”; “In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line”; “Excelsior” (really; towards the end). Oh oh. So dramatic.…
John DePetro has some details about the Providence police’s car chase of a BMW with three teens shooting BB guns out the windows: Following this incident, the Providence Police began reviewing the circumstances of the arrest of one of the vehicle’s occupants, including any injuries sustained and the use of force involved. Late last week,…
John DePetro and Justin Katz talk about the politics of the day, with things that should be easy proving difficult and things that would have to be difficult being passed off as easy.
Having not seen video of the incident, nobody should be assuming that Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza and his public safety commissioner, Steven Paré, are exaggerating when they say, as Steph Machado reports for WPRI, that these officers used excessive force: The arrests of the two 15-year-olds and one 16-year-old took place in the early hours…
John DePetro reports that one of the families involved in the Sayles Street neighbor dispute a few weeks ago is nearing the $15,000 goal of its GoFundMe campaign. Give some thought to the process by which they’re monetizing debate. Without assigning blame for who started it, we can state as fact that this family was…
Speaking about a murder on Public Street in Providence, Democrat Mayor Jorge Elorza insists, “There’s just too many firearms out there, and not just too many firearms, but too many automatic firearms.” In other words, he blames the guns. Last month, Providence Journal writer Amy Russo began an article on guns by asserting: “Violence tends to…
More and more, it appears that the way a story is covered by the media and addressed by government officials depends most on the skin color of the people involved, as John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss.