As of Oct. 31, state and local police across Rhode Island had invoked the red flag law on 33 occasions since its adoption in June 2018. The law allows police to petition a court for an "extreme risk protection order" that allows them to confiscate firearms from individuals believed to be at "imminent risk" of killing themselves or others.

PROVIDENCE — Two days before Christmas, Cranston police were contacted by a "concerned individual" about a text message. It contained a photo of the sender holding a Smith & Wesson pistol in his mouth.

Officers went to the house. The man came to the door unarmed, but when confronted about his disturbing text to an acquaintance, he told the officers "the firearm was on the kitchen table ... a safe in the bedroom was open with ammunition inside. ... [He] admitted he intended to commit suicide."

As Cranston Police Chief Michael J. Winquist recounted this latest in a series of incidents that prompted his department to seek and receive court orders allowing his officers to confiscate firearms under Rhode Island's "red flag" law, he said Saturday: "There have been other, similar cases where a subject made suicidal statements or posted their intent on social media.

"In another case, a worker made comments he had a desire to kill certain co-workers and boasted he owned firearms. Firearms were seized from the individual, and an extreme risk protection order was obtained. After a hearing, the order remains in effect. We had other[s] that were related to domestic violence."

All this in a single Rhode Island city.

As of Oct. 31, state and local police across Rhode Island had invoked the red flag law on 33 occasions since its adoption in June 2018. The law allows police to petition a court for an "extreme risk protection order," which allows them to confiscate firearms from individuals believed to be at "imminent risk" of killing themselves or others.

Cranston has used the law at least eight times; Cumberland, seven times; Woonsocket, three times; Warwick and Johnston, twice; West Warwick, North Smithfield, Narragansett, Hopkinton, South Kingstown, Warren, Central Falls, Barrington and Westerly, once each; and the state police twice, according to a Journal analysis of state court data. (The count does not include Cranston's Dec. 23 suicide intervention.)

The records of all of these cases are sealed, so it is unclear what prompted each of these actions, but summary data indicate that firearms were seized in at least five of the cases. No firearms were seized in at least six others. The outcome in the other cases is displayed as a question mark.

Only two red flag petitions in the court data-run were marked as "denied" or "expired by agreement." One had been filed by the state police in October 2019, and the other by the town of Warren in September 2018.

"Although the impact of the law is difficult to measure since it is preventative in nature, I believe that the removal of firearms and prevention of future purchases of firearms from individuals in Cranston, where extreme risk protection orders were granted by the court, likely averted potential tragedies," Winquist told The Journal.

Not all cases are as cut and dried as the case Winquist described in Cranston.

Woonsocket Police Chief Thomas F. Oates III recalls the better-safe-than-sorry occasion when his department invoked the red flag law to obtain a court order allowing them to remove firearms from the home of a man who had repeatedly threatened "to kill the police chief in Woonsocket when he had the chance."

The man had made the threat a number of times in therapy sessions.

"It was brought to our attention. ... We didn’t know if he had firearms or not," Oates said. "He claimed he did have a firearm, described ... what it was. We went through the process, got a search warrant, first and foremost to see if he did possess it.

"The long and the short, in this particular case, he did not have the firearm he said he had, but just by doing that, it gave us the ability to vet this out. He [later] claimed he never had any of that intention, just something he’d said."

"It all worked out," Oates continued. "We were able to clearly evaluate the threat and realize there wasn’t any threat," but without "that legal mechanism ... we really wouldn’t have had anything else other than to just go knock on the door. "

The sometimes fatal mix of mental illness and firearms came to the forefront on Dec. 19, when a man with a history of making homicidal and suicidal threats opened fire in the lobby of his Westerly affordable housing complex, killing one and injuring two before turning the gun on himself.

"The red flags that went up prior to the Westerly shooting are very alarming, and I look forward to seeing better implementation of Rhode Island's new red flag law,” said Jennifer Boylan, a volunteer with the Rhode Island chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “As such, Moms Demand Action volunteers are launching a Red Flag Awareness campaign in 2020."

Over the years, Westerly police had several contacts with the shooter, 66-year-old Joseph Giachello. In 2002, Giachello was emergency certified to a psychiatric hospital after threatening to buy a gun at Walmart and kill himself and his wife.

But the last contact Westerly police had with Giachello before the Dec. 19 shooting was in January 2018, months before the red flag law went into effect, and Giachello seemed to be in good health. Any "red flags" that Giachello showed involving guns and mental health, Westerly police said, came up years before they had the red flag law at their disposal.

In November, Giachello went to a gun shop in another town, Richmond, to buy the .38-caliber revolver he used. He picked it up just two days before the shooting. Police in Westerly did not know that Giachello was buying a gun; police departments receive copies of applications to buy guns in the towns where they're sold, not where the buyer lives.

“If we were aware he was getting a gun, and we went through our history of him, would it have triggered something to potentially look at the red flag law to look to see if we wanted to take the gun? Yes,” said Westerly Police Chief Shawn Lacey.

Lacey described himself as a "big proponent" of the red flag law, which the department used once, successfully.

Signed into law on June 1, 2018, Rhode Island's "red flag" law was adopted by state lawmakers in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre and high-school shootings that left a trail of death in Parkland, Fla. and Sante Fe, Texas.

The overwhelming House and Senate votes in favor of the new law would have been almost unimaginable in other years at the Rhode Island State House, where the gun lobby still has powerful supporters and lobbyists, including a former House speaker whose portrait literally loomed over past hearings on gun-control measures that were stymied.

At last count, 17 states and the District of Columbia had red flag laws, according to the Giffords Law Center. Twelve of these states and D.C. allow family or household members, as well as law enforcement, to submit a petition for an extreme risk protection order. Maryland and D.C. also allow mental-health providers to petition; New York also allows school administrators to petition; and Hawaii allows medical professionals, coworkers and educators to petition.

Rhode Island is one of three states, along with Florida and Vermont, that only allow petitions by law enforcement, according to the Giffords Law Center.

Under Rhode Island law, state or local police can petition the Superior Court to issue an extreme risk protection order upon receipt of “credible information” of a significant and imminent risk. There is a penalty of up to five years in jail and a $5,000 fine for knowingly providing false information.

At the initial hearing — usually the same day as the petition, without the targeted individual being present — a judge decides if there is probable cause to think someone is a risk. If so, the judge can issue a 14-day order that allows police to search the individual’s home and confiscate any firearms.

A second hearing, with the individual present and able to argue on his or her own behalf, is required within 14 days to determine if a one-year ban on buying or possessing firearms is warranted.

As to why Cranston leads all other local R.I. police departments in filings, Winquist told The Journal: "We incorporated the red flag law into department policy and educated all of our officers, which may be a contributing factor of why our department has filed a high number of red flag petitions."

He said his department's policy on when to file a red flag petition with the court mirrors state law: A recent act or threat of violence by the individual against himself/herself or others, regardless of whether the act or threat of violence involves a firearm; a pattern of acts or threats of violence within the past 12 month; the individual's criminal and mental health history, including animal abuse; "the unlawful, threatening, or reckless use or brandishing of a firearm," including "act(s) taken or displayed through social media."

"Our goal is to intervene before a tragedy occurs, using the legal process now available to law enforcement since the passage of the red flag law in Rhode Island," Winquist said.

The law is not without controversy.

In an interview law week, Frank Saccoccio, the president and chief lobbyist for the Rhode Island Second Amendment Coalition, said judges encourage people to voluntarily agree to have the court enter a "mutual restraining order with no findings of fact, and the court does that very often."

"So what happens is ...'I' never get a chance at that point to put any witnesses on, to question anybody. ... At that point, 'I' have a clean record. There is no finding by a judge that 'I' did anything wrong, but my rights are gone. You don't see that as wrong? I see that as absolutely a violation of due process."

"There is another problem," Saccoccio added.

"Most police departments will say, when you petition to get your firearms back, 'I have an affidavit where this person said this, this, this and this. Because of that, I don't want to give you your firearms back, and now you have to file suit to get them back. ... Now, none of those allegations were [ever] substantiated or contradicted. But the police department gets to take them as gospel."