By Sam Wroblewski 630wpro.com
The Rhode Island chapter of the ACLU is calling on the Cranston City Council and the Rhode Island State Police to initiate a broader investigation into the city’s police department.
In the wake of a State Police report calling the Cranston Police Department “mismanaged” and politically interfered with by Mayor Allan Fung, the CLU says this could be the “tip of an iceberg” in regards to police practices.
“We think there are lots of questions as to whether this was really everything, and whether similar types of questionable activities were undertaken by police in other circumstances that weren’t the subject of the report,” said RI ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown.
Brown points to the State Police report which states former Chief of Police Marco Palumbo hiring private investigators to spy on cops, and using police and state databases to get information on a civilian contractor.
Another “dubious” instance highlighted in the report was police improperly seeking access to phone records by making misleading statements to the court.
“It almost seems like it was par for the course for high ranking police officials to feel they had the absolute authority to engage in questionable conduct in order to punish other police officers they didn’t like for one reason or another.”
The letter to the city council states that the investigation should look back as far as 2009 to determine if police “may have engaged in other questionable activities against city residents.”
