NEFAC’s Mike Stanton provided the following remarks during a May 22, 2025 hearing of the Rhode Island Senate Committee on the Judiciary.
My name is Mike Stanton. I’m here on behalf of the First Amendment Coalition of New England. I was a Providence Journal reporter from 1985 to 2013 and now I’m a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut, but still live here in Rhode Island.
We’ve been coming up here for several years now, seeking some basic but important changes to APRA to streamline it and improve government transparency. But year after year, we run into roadblocks. We’ve been told by legislative leaders that this isn’t really something of interest to other than you reporters. They don’t hear it from your constituents.
But of course, your constituents are concerned about housing and health care and education, but they also care about honest, effective and open government. They want to know what’s happening with the Washington Bridge. They care when their personal information is hacked in a cyber attack on the state’s public benefit system. They want to know if the governor’s office received a subpoena regarding a contract that flouted procurement laws. The governor refused to confirm a subpoena. This bill would make subpoenas to a public body a public record. And by the way, when I covered Operation Plunder Dome, the federal corruption probe of Buddy Cianci, City Hall, the city of Providence gave us federal subpoenas, and so did the state in other cases I worked on.
I’m tired of having various members of the governor’s administration come up here and offer you self-serving reasons to kill this bill and frustrate accountability. This bill isn’t about him, it’s for the people.
Modernizing APRA will provide desperately needed consistency in the release of public records. Look at how the costs that the governor assessed different reporters were all over the map when they sought inspection reports for the Washington Bridge. This bill also addresses a growing problem of some police departments not including the narrative in arrest reports. The narrative is the meat and potatoes of an arrest report, a description of what happens. When I worked at the ProJo they were routinely provided as part of an arrest report. Departments have not been giving that out, leaving the public in the dark.
I had my UConn journalism students a few years ago request arrest reports from every police department in Rhode Island and the responses were all over the map. Some gave us a narrative. Others didn’t. Some said that they weren’t entitled to it because they weren’t a party to the case, or they would have to go to court and get it from the court file. Others said, yeah, we’d have to get it from court or pay.
Similarly, there have been instances where police will release body cam footage when it makes them look good quickly and at no charge. But when WPRI’s Tim White asked for body cam footage from several cases of alleged misuse of force from Providence a few years ago, he was told it would cost over $3,000.
The bill would also make it easier to access 911 calls. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the 911 calls were sealed in the 1990s when I was working at the Journal after journalists reported on a 911 call by the wife of a top state prosecutor who said she was being beaten. And today, if your brother collapsed and died at a sandwich shop and an anonymous passerby called 911, you would not be able to get the recording to try to piece together the last moments of his life. This is an actual story that Lynn Arditi reported for the Public’s Radio six years ago.
In conclusion, the common-sense changes in this bill can increase public confidence in government and send a clear message that you care about your constituents, about transparency. Thank you very much.