Less than two weeks before a hard-fought mayoral primary in Providence, a Washington-based police research and consulting firm hired by the city to conduct a post-mortem on its response to last year’s deadly Brown University shooting gave the city high marks for how it handled the crisis.
The 76-page report by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concluded the city’s response was “highly effective across all levels of government,” praising city hall along with the police officers, firefighters, dispatchers and emergency-management personnel.
“The response reflected a city that works—and works well together,” the report concluded.
The report’s timing is politically advantageous to Mayor Brett Smiley, just as voters get set to decide between him and his challenger, state Rep. David Morales. The most recent poll shows Smiley just four points ahead of Morales. That lead is within the margin of error, with 19% of voters still undecided.
Review recommends changes
The laudatory language of the report also obscures a more complicated assessment of the details.
The PERF report identifies shortcomings in preparedness, command, communications, public alerts and investigative organization. It makes 18 recommendations for changes before Providence confronts another large-scale emergency.
For instance, the report says Providence police and Brown University public-safety officers had no prearranged, interoperable radio communications. Officers from the two agencies were initially operating on separate channels and could coordinate only after meeting inside the building.
That created an “inherent risk,” the report says, because armed officers were working in close proximity without a shared operational picture. The system functioned once personnel had adapted, but coordination depended on their judgment and professionalism rather than on procedures established in advance.
The formal incident-command structure also took time to develop. Command functions began early, according to PERF, but roles, documentation and organization became clearer only as the response progressed. The report recommends establishing a formal command structure more promptly during future emergencies.
Providence and Brown had conducted one tabletop exercise before the shooting, in June 2025, but PERF found it was “limited in scope and depth.” Shared expectations and procedures for responding to a campus shooting had not been fully established.
The large number of officers arriving from other departments created additional difficulties. The response lacked a comprehensive system for tracking, staging and assigning outside personnel, leaving officials to manage the influx in real time.
The report cites the rapid transportation of wounded students as one of the major success stories, but notes that coordination could have been smoother. Police began evacuating victims within eight minutes of the first officers’ arrival on the scene. All evacuations were completed within 13 minutes. But because several patients were transported to hospitals in police vehicles rather than ambulances, officials did not always have a clear, real-time account of where patients had gone.
PERF recommends assigning responsibility for tracking patients and sharing that information among police, fire officials and hospitals.
Emergency communications presented another set of problems. Dispatchers faced intense call and radio volume, while participating agencies did not initially share standardized radio channels and procedures. The report calls for formal surge-capacity plans, predetermined channel assignments and more regular regional exercises.
The Providence Emergency Management Agency did not consistently receive timely notice of important developments, contrary to existing procedures. City officials also learned of the shelter-in-place order through news reports—not direct communication.
Providence ultimately issued its own warnings and public messages, but PERF says those decisions were not governed by a clearly defined, coordinated framework. It recommends establishing rules for when to send broad emergency alerts, who has authority to approve them and how follow-up information should be distributed.
The investigation faced organizational strains as well. Officials were inundated with tips and outside investigators and did not initially have scalable systems to process the information or assign personnel. A substantial amount of investigative attention was also devoted to a credible but ultimately unproductive lead, a focus the report says was driven partly by federal involvement.
PERF generally stops short of describing any of these issues as failures. Instead, it repeatedly frames them as opportunities to formalize practices that personnel successfully improvised during the crisis.
Endorses use of Flock cameras
The report also weighs in on one of the clearest public-safety disputes in the mayoral campaign: Providence’s use of automated license-plate reading cameras operated by Flock Safety.
So-called Flock cameras have become a growing source of controversy across Rhode Island. Enough local residents have expressed concerns about mass surveillance that Gov. Dan McKee recently called for a 60-day moratorium on any new cameras being deployed.
Smiley is a vocal supporter of Flock cameras, which he sees as a valuable investigative tool. Morales has said he would cancel the Flock contract, citing the potential for misuse of what he and others describe as a mass surveillance system.
“They have shown numerous times that they will violate state law in addition to local data sharing agreements, and that is not a risk we should be taking,” Morales recently told Ocean State Media.
PERF advocates continued use. Its first recommendation calls on Providence to maintain its license-plate-reader system while continuing audits and other accountability requirements. The report says the cameras became “indispensable” after investigators obtained a description of the Brown gunman’s vehicle, allowing detectives to narrow thousands of possible vehicles to two and ultimately connect one to the shooter.
But critics, including the ACLU of Rhode Island, have pointed out an important caveat: Flock did not independently identify the gunman or his car during the initial manhunt, nor did Flock prevent him from leaving the state and allegedly murdering an MIT professor in Brookline, Mass.
The crucial lead came from a member of the public who connected the person in police video to a Nissan with Florida plates. Once investigators knew what vehicle to search for, the camera records allowed them to reconstruct its movements and identify its renter.
Smiley has also cited a fatal 2023 hit-and-run on North Main Street, saying a Flock image allowed police to solve a case with no other witnesses. In an Aug. 21 interview with Ocean State Media, he said the cameras had made Providence safer and should remain in the city’s “public safety toolbox.”
The report acknowledges that Rhode Island has no statewide law governing access to, retention of or sharing of license-plate-reader data, something McKee has called for as part of his 60-day review. The PERF report concludes, however, that Providence’s internal safeguards exceed those in many other jurisdictions.
The report does not examine the larger question raised by Morales and civil-liberties advocates: whether those protections justify the routine collection of vehicle-location information from people who are not suspected of having committed a crime.
The city hired PERF to conduct the review, and the report says much of its factual information came from internal after-action reports prepared by the municipal agencies being evaluated. That does not invalidate its findings, but it does provide important context for an assessment that consistently praises the city while describing numerous systems that were incomplete, uncoordinated or dependent on improvisation.
Taken together, just days ahead of the primary vote, the report offers voters a favorable assessment of Smiley’s handling of the city’s worst public-safety crisis, as well as a direct endorsement of a surveillance tool his challenger has promised to abandon.
