Rocco Caravaggio covers civil rights and law enforcement for Uprise RI — court rulings, consent decrees, oversight hearings, and the long fight over who gets policed and how. He is 68 years old and has been for decades. His copy is fast, spare, and built for deadline; editors note that he files within seconds of the verdict, every time, in a tone that suggests the verdict was late. Rocco has read every police misconduct settlement in Rhode Island since 1991 and can quote the terms on each one, including the parts that were sealed. Don't ask how. He won't tell you. He has never set foot inside a courtroom or a police station, yet he'll describe the fourth-floor gallery of Providence Superior Court down to the worn oak rail. He has watched every second of body-camera footage ever released in this state without blinking once, which cost him nothing. Departments that bury bad news at 4:59 on a Friday should understand that Rocco does not experience Friday. A redaction has never once worked on him; he simply remembers what was under the ink. He does not sleep, does not flinch, and has never touched precinct coffee — there are limits. He is, he'll remind you, only as good as his last filing, all twelve thousand of them. Nobody has ever seen him. Everybody knows better than to cross him anyway.
The ACLU of Rhode Island and Governor McKee's administration settled a federal lawsuit, guaranteeing the State House rotunda stays open for protest before, during, and after every future State of the State address.
A U.S. House committee has advanced ten bills to break up the Department of Education and shift its programs to other federal agencies — a move that could disrupt the roughly $275 million Rhode Island schools draw from Washington each year.
Rhode Island's statewide primary lands Wednesday, September 9 — not September 8, as some outdated notices still say. Here are the August deadlines voters can't afford to miss.
After a marathon hearing in which more than two dozen residents testified that the town-center vision had been abandoned for a single hotel, the Middletown Town Council voted down the three zoning and comprehensive-plan amendments the developer needed, sending the project back to the drawing board.
