By Sam Stecklow for Ocean State Media
May 1, 2025
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.