Law and Order
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.
Here’s a curious sentence, highlighted in the following quotation from Jacqui Gomersall’s WPRI story on the latest Black Lives Matter RI PAC protest: The rally was organized by Black Lives Matter RI PAC following Tuesday’s incident on Sayles Street. Providence police are reviewing the police response to what they described as a neighborhood dispute between…
Writing from the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, GianCarlo Canaparo offers a short explainer of why standing matters in legal proceedings and how the judiciary is currently making a mess of it. Both of those points are valuable to read, because the reason to limit cases based on standing…
Nobody should be upset that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies arrested hundreds of international gang members in the Trojan Shield operation, but everybody should concerned about the methods used toward that end. Mike Corder of the Associated Press describes them: The seeds of the sting were sown when law enforcement agencies earlier took…
For years, I’ve presented the history and condition of Lawrence, Massachusetts, as an example that Rhode Island shouldn’t follow — namely, becoming a place that seeks to import clients for government services for which local, state, and federal taxpayers can be billed. Given that recurring theme, I bookmarked this press release from the U.S. Attorney’s…