Rhode Island Resists Efforts at Policing Reform Embraced by Every Other State

In October, a Newport County jury found that former Jamestown Police Det. Derek Carlino was negligent in his involvement in the death by suicide of a teenager. But it won’t end Carlino’s career in policing.

A report commissioned by the Portsmouth School Department found Carlino had worked with a football coach to pressure fifteen-year-old Nathan Bruno to name students who had participated in some minor harassment of the coach. Under pressure from two such authority figures, Bruno died by suicide in 2019.

Bruno’s family sued. In October, a jury awarded the family of Nathan Bruno $5.4 million, finding that football coach Ryan Moniz was the “proximate” cause of Bruno’s death, while Carlino and two other officials were “negligent.” In 2023, as the lawsuit was winding through the court system, Carlino left the Jamestown Police Department after a long career. But it wasn’t because of this case — or due to misconduct at all, according to officials. He’s now a patrol officer just across the bay in Narragansett.

In every other state, officers embroiled in the legal system or facing serious charges of misconduct can be stripped of their certification to be a police officer, preventing them from being rehired by another agency. That is not the case in Rhode Island, making it the last state in the nation without a system in place to revoke certifications of officers.

Most states have implemented such a system after a Missouri law professor began advocating for their expansion in the late 1980s. In recent years, reform advocates have successfully pushed for the other remaining straggler states — California, Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Jersey — to get on board. Now, only Rhode Island remains.

When compared with holders of other professional certifications issued by Rhode Island state government, police enjoy a particular privilege: like contractors, plumbers, cosmetologists, doctors, or lawyers, police have to go through a state-sanctioned training program, without which they cannot work in their chosen profession. Unlike those other professionals, however, once a Rhode Island cop has been issued their academy graduation certificate, nothing can change that fact.

The Rhode Island Police Officers Commission of Standards and Training (POST) is the body that issues graduation certificates to officers who have completed its requisite training. Thanks to a 2021 change in policy, the POST commission now inactivates an officer’s training certification when they leave an agency for any reason. Any new agency covered by POST that wants to hire them must submit a packet including a notarized form and disclosing the reason why the officer left their previous agency.

However, even if it rejects a transfer — which it has only done once, records show — the POST commission still has no ability to strip an officer of their Rhode Island certification, after legislation failed for at least the third time in 2024.

The level of review exercised by POST is unclear; while officials describe it as extensive, the policy is brief, and POST refuses to release records from the lateral transfer packets. Ultimately, much of the power in hiring remains in the hands of individual police chiefs — at both the old agencies, to investigate and discipline misconduct, and the new ones, to unearth any disqualifying past deeds.

There are also a significant amount of police transfers still completely unreviewed by any outside body. State law exempts the Providence Police Department from any of POST’s regulations or oversight, despite the fact that PPD chief Col. Oscar Perez is POST’s vice chair. Officials said several other agencies, including all officers under the state Department of Public Safety, also operate outside of POST.

The continued lack of decertification authority also means that there’s little that would prevent a problem officer from having their Rhode Island training recognized by another state and receiving a state certification elsewhere, said Sid Wordell, the executive director of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs’ Association (RIPCA).

“We’re a small state,” Wordell said in an interview. “Usually, if an officer leaves because of an issue, it goes through the chiefs anyway. But if that officer was to leave and decide they want to go to Florida, for instance, it’s up to that agency in whatever state they’re going to to make sure that they do the appropriate background.”

The decertifying process available in every other state is meant to help prevent so-called “wandering officers,” police officers who resign before they are punished for breaking laws or department policies only to resurface elsewhere.

Many high-profile incidents of police misconduct around the country involve “wandering officers.”

Tamir Rice, a Black 12-year-old, was killed in 2014 while playing with a toy gun at a park by a Cleveland Police officer who had previously displayed “dismal” handgun performance with a suburban department. The killing of Anton Black, a 19-year-old Black man killed by a Maryland officer previously criminally charged for excessive force in Delaware, led to the passage of a state law opening access to police misconduct records previously kept secret. Sonya Massey, a Black Illinois woman, was killed after calling police for help last year by a sheriff’s deputy, now facing murder charges, who had a history of documented misconduct at multiple prior departments.

Wordell, of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs’ Association, warned Rhode Island legislators of the dangers of “wandering officers” years ago. In an August 2020 hearing of a special legislative task force created after the murder of George Floyd, he called the phenomenon a “common occurrence,” and said officers can often exploit loopholes in the law and policing custom in Rhode Island by resigning or retiring when faced with sanctions.

“Therefore, a police officer subject to discipline by one law enforcement agency in Rhode Island who decides to resign or retire from that agency does so without a disciplinary finding,” Wordell said, according to the meeting minutes. “Thus, there is no record of discipline when they apply to a job at another law enforcement agency.”

The New England Area Conference of the NAACP urged the task force to adopt “a strong statewide POST system to certify police officers and enable de-certification for misconduct and abuse.”

That did not happen. Ultimately, the task force’s December 2020 recommendations were entirely silent on the issue of preventing an officer who committed misconduct from simply picking up and moving elsewhere.

In Rhode Island, the POST commission only started tracking officer movement in 2021 — there is no record of when or why police officers switched departments before then. And the state’s failure to create any kind of system to strip officers of their certifications leaves residents in an informational black hole about officers’ histories. Full information about each individual officer is kept only by each employing police department, the Rhode Island Department of Public Safety wrote in response to a records request in 2023.

Nearly every other state in the country maintains data showing officer movement between agencies going back decades, and 27 of those states have released that data to a national reporting project including Invisible Institute.

In September, Invisible Institute and partner organizations launched the National Police Index, a police employment lookup data tool that now houses data from 24 states across the country — driving home the lack of access in Rhode Island.

Access to police employment data has helped researchers and reporters in states across the country show dangerous loopholes, and explore legislative solutions.

“It’s not just an issue of Rhode Island being one of the few states in the country that doesn’t have a decertification law,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island.

“Rhode Island has always been a secretive state when it comes to police misconduct. It’s something that we’ve been fighting over for many years. It’s also the fact that Rhode Island is one of a minority of states that has a very strong Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, and, as interpreted by the courts, a relatively weak open records law in terms of gaining access to information about police misconduct.

“So when you put that all together, it makes it very difficult to monitor police misconduct occurring in the state.”

Since the POST commission adopted its new process in 2021, it has approved at least 220 transfers between departments, records show — providing a look at the volume of transfers left entirely unrecorded at a state level in decades prior.

In each meeting, members of the POST commission vote on every lateral transfer application, ideally with the chief for each newly hiring department present.

Under the new rules, Wordell said the POST commission thoroughly reviews the transfers. “I’m aware of an incident where the department said, ‘Hey, they did leave pending an investigation. [It] wasn’t criminal. But at the end of the day, we’re not saying he left in good standing,’ and there was a hearing at the POST, and the POST didn’t certify that officer to reactivate their certification,” Wordell said.

There has even been an occasion in which the POST commission instructed an agency to reach out to two past employers of an officer after receiving a less-than-complete background investigation, he said.

“The process did what it was intended to do,” Wordell said. “It flushed out the fact that an individual was not leaving one department under a cloud and then being hired by another department [without] being fully assessed by the new hiring department.”

In response to a request for denied transfer applications, the Department of Public Safety released a single record: meeting minutes from June 23, 2022, in which the commission considered a lateral application in a closed session. The only detail the minutes provide is that the commission’s rejection was unanimous.

Allison Magnus / RIPBS

Col. Michael Winquist, the Cranston police chief who chairs the POST commission and has opposed decertification legislation, agreed that the new process is working as intended. “The POST is focused on ensuring officers who are terminated or resigned in place of termination cannot continue their law enforcement careers with another law enforcement agency requiring RI POST-certification,” he wrote in an email.

“Rhode Island is a small state, and Chiefs can easily vet a lateral transfer applicant,” Winquist said. “Officers know that Chiefs of all departments routinely communicate with each other, which may explain why few officers with significant disciplinary issues apply for lateral transfer, causing the number of rejected applications to be so low.”

But the POST commission’s 2021 guidelines lack the kind of specifics experts say are important in a transparent process. Absent is any kind of standard by which the commission is meant to review transfers, or what a denial means for an officer’s future employment — are there appeal rights? Can they apply again in the future? Neither question is answered in the policy.

“It’s not a landing place for where you want your regulatory regime to be,” Jorge Camacho, a Yale law professor who studies POST commissions across the country. “There’s an interest in having clean delineations that make it clear to us, and to officers, and to departments, and to regulators, what the standards are and what happens when you fail to meet them.

“By not having a regime that offers that level of closure and clarity, I think raises far more questions than it helps resolve.”

The legal authority for the POST commission to take any action based on its review of a lateral transfer is “murky,” agreed Josh Parker, deputy director of policy for the NYU Policing Project, which supported past efforts to change POST regulations.

“An argument could be made that, in order for these graduation certificates to carry any meaning, the Standards and Training Board should have the authority to restrict or withdraw them under certain circumstances,” he said. “But it’s not clear and it’s pretty murky authority in Rhode Island — the only state in the country that does not give its POST board clear authority to suspend or revoke an officer’s license when they engage in serious misconduct.”

Nearly 800 officers work for agencies not covered by POST regulations, including the Providence Police Department, Rhode Island State Police, Capitol Police, Division of Sheriffs, and the Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation — and transfers into those agencies go unrecorded.

All told, they represent around 30 percent of the sworn officers in Rhode Island — also the only state to exempt such a large percentage of officers from statewide policing regulations, said Parker. That, he said, “defies logic.”

The 220-plus transfers approved since 2021 include three officers with serious public allegations of misconduct.

At the time the lawsuit related to the death by suicide of 15-year-old Nathan Bruno was filed, Det. Derek Carlino was defended by Jamestown police. Jamestown’s police chief at the time, Edward Mello, who is now the town administrator and also serves on the POST commission, told the Jamestown Press that he was confident in the “appropriateness and process” of Carlino’s investigation. That position has now been refuted by a jury.

Another legal complaint filed with Jamestown in July 2023 alleged that Carlino and then-Jamestown Police Lt. Angela Deneault made misrepresentations to a judge when filing an application for an arrest warrant. Lawyers with the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office withdrew the application before the arrest was executed.

Despite these cases, Carlino’s transfer to the Narragansett Police was approved unanimously in November 2023 by the POST commission. Minutes show that Mello was not present at the meeting, but a one-sentence letter from Jamestown Police Chief James Campbell reads that Carlino was “in good standing” at the time of the letter. The Narragansett Police Department rejected a request for records about its hiring of Carlino, and has not responded to a request for comment. Carlino could not be reached for comment.

Allison Magnus / RIPBS

Another officer, Jared Boudreault, was approved to transfer from the Pawtucket Police Department to the Foster Police Department in September 2023, records released by the POST commission show.

While serving as a School Resource Officer in Pawtucket in 2015, Boudreault was captured on cell phone video tackling a student at Tolman High School, prompting protests outside of the school and a letter of concern from the state ACLU. The incident resulted in Boudreault’s transfer out of the school, but later reports showed that he had previously been investigated for excessive force outside of school grounds, as well.

In response to inquiries from Invisible Institute and The Public’s Radio, Foster Police Chief Gina-marie Lindell wrote in an email that Boudreault had been “honest and forthright with our questions about the incident that occurred in 2015,” and that the Foster police “confirmed that a thorough investigation was conducted by both Pawtucket Police Department and the Rhode Island State Police,” both of which cleared Boudreault, she wrote. “Furthermore, his lateral transfer to the Foster Police Department was approved by the Rhode Island POST.”

However, in response to a public records request, the city of Pawtucket said that it did not possess a letter of good standing for Boudreault.

When asked whether Boudreault had received a letter of good standing from Pawtucket, the department refused to answer directly. “He would not have been hired without one,” Capt. Tyler Domingos wrote in an email asking about the letter. When pushed for a more concrete answer, Chief Lindell replied, “We have advised you that a thorough background of Officer Boudreault was performed.”

The Rhode Island Department of Public Safety denied a request for records the POST commission considered about the two transfers, and said the meetings where they had been discussed had not been recorded.

In another strikingly similar case to Boudreault’s, the transfer of Kyle Rooney from the Narragansett police department to East Greenwich was approved in January 2025. Roughly 14 months earlier, the ACLU reached a $75,000 settlement in a lawsuit over a 2018 incident in which he threw a high-schooler to the ground and choked him for making an obscene gesture. The East Greenwich Police Department denied a request for its background investigation of Rooney. Narragansett, too, rejected a request for any letter of good standing — or otherwise — it sent to East Greenwich.

In an email, POST commission chair Winquist wrote, “As a police chief who has hired many officers, including some from other departments, an officer being named in a lawsuit or having an administrative allegation lodged against them would not automatically preclude them from being a viable candidate. I would consider the validity and outcome of the allegations.”

Harrison Tuttle, who leads the Black Lives Matter RI PAC, said the fact that officers with these backgrounds are able to transfer without the public being notified except in obscure meeting minutes is troubling. “It’s literally something that if we knew and had the information, we would advocate [about]”, he said in an interview.

Ultimately, the police transfer system is still reliant on local police chiefs to fully investigate and discipline police misconduct. As reporting has shown, that does not always happen in Rhode Island.

Beyond the public being able to track employment history of Rhode Island police officers over their careers, the lack of access to a centralized accounting of officers’ training, certification and transfers impacts attorneys working in criminal defense, experts said.

In criminal cases, information showing an officer moving between departments could be entirely innocuous. But if related to misconduct, it could be the key to exposing evidentiary issues that lead to clearing someone’s name. This kind of information is usually called Brady or Giglio information, named after decades-old U.S. Supreme Court decisions requiring prosecutors to turn over records that could help criminal defendants. Many prosecutors keep what are known as Brady lists to ensure that they make their required disclosures.

Rhode Island’s size poses a somewhat unique complication to that question, said Andrew Horwitz, a law professor at Roger Williams University who directs the law school’s criminal defense clinic. Because Rhode Island is so small, felonies are prosecuted by one office — the attorney general’s — instead of country prosecutors. That means it’s unlikely that an officer can escape being on that particular office’s Brady list by moving to a new department, which has occurred in larger states.

But misdemeanors, which Horwitz and his students defend through his clinic, are tried by municipal prosecutors strewn throughout Rhode Island. Many of them are simply private attorneys contracted out to a municipality, or even several towns.

“One of the significant disadvantages of having every individual city and town prosecute its own misdemeanors is that the knowledge base is going to be much, much more limited,” Horwitz said, also pointing to “significant turnover” in prosecuting attorneys.

It’s unlikely that cities or towns keep so-called “Brady lists,” Horwitz said. “In the absence of that kind of a list, it seems to me it would be entirely anecdotal and coincidental if a prosecutor actually came to know of some prior disciplinary action involving some police officer.”

He added that being able to access employment history data would “absolutely be useful to me, if police credibility is important in [a] case.”

“It is horrifying to think that a prior history of misconduct could be kept from a jury simply because a defense lawyer doesn’t know where to look,” said Kara Manosh, president of the Rhode Island Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in a statement. “Access to employment history solves this problem and gives a defendant the full and fair opportunity to present all evidence to a jury. There should be no systemic barriers to this information.”

What’s more is that departments across Rhode Island and the country have reported hiring, recruitment and retention issues for several years. Experts warn this could result in “wandering officers” becoming a more attractive option for some departments.

Given Rhode Island’s historic reluctance to give the state any disciplinary power over police certifications, it’s impossible to analyze the full scope of the problem within the state — or track officers who leave with an unblemished record on paper.

“It sounds like what needs to happen,” Horwitz said, “is that Rhode Island needs to come in line with the other jurisdictions that have a both a viable certification and decertification process, and that we need to get on that train so that we’re not contributing to the problem of problem officers being cycled through different agencies.”

This story was produced as a collaboration by Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization, and The Public’s Radio.

Sam Stecklow is an investigative journalist and FOIA fellow with Invisible Institute. Follow him on Bluesky at @samstecklow.bsky.social or email him at sam@invisibleinstitute.com.