R.I. man arrested after allegedly throwing Cape Verdean flag to the ground and stomping on it
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Police said around noon, Marsden approached City Hall on a moped and walked up to flags on display outside the building's entrance. He then allegedly threw the American and Cape Verdean flags to the ground, officials said.
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'Witnesses reported that Marsden was observed specifically stomping on the Cape Verdean flag. The incident was captured on a surveillance video,' police said.
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Marsden was charged with vandalism, disorderly conduct, and 'weapons other than Firearms Prohibited (knife),' according to authorities. Police said officials were working with the Rhode Island Attorney General's Office to determine if 'additional hate crime enhancements will be pursued in this case.'
'Our agency takes these acts of vandalism seriously and will pursue hate crime enhancements when warranted,' Acting Police Chief Michael Rapoza said in a statement.
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'There is no place for this type of behavior in our city,' Rapoza added.
Marsden was scheduled to be arraigned in Providence County District Court on Thursday morning, police said.
Christopher Gavin can be reached at
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Fundamentally, that means less news and information for Americans, and that's anti democratic.' Organizations representing journalists at CBS have offered a statement in support of their workers. 'The Writers Guild of America East stands behind the exemplary work of our members at '60 Minutes' and CBS News. We wish their bosses at Paramount Global had the courage to do the same,' it said in a statement. 'Paramount's decision to capitulate to Trump threatens journalists' ability to do their job reporting on powerful public figures.' Trump has long accused the media of being biased against him and painting him in a negative light. Distrust in the media and perceptions that it has a liberal media bias are widely shared among many conservatives. Gallup's poll found that just 12% of Republicans trust the media even a fair amount, a notably lower figure than for either Democrats or independents. In the statement praising the settlement as a win for media accountability, the spokesperson for Trump's legal team said that 'CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle.' What does the FCC have to do with it—if anything? Under Trump, the FCC has been putting the press under greater scrutiny. The agency, which regulates broadcast, television, radio, wire, and satellite in the U.S., opened investigations into PBS and NPR, both of which receive federal funding, in January over concerns that they could be violating federal law by airing commercials. The following month it opened a 'broadcast news distortion' probe into CBS over the '60 Minutes' interview. The FCC's broadcast news distortion rule is an informal policy that directs the agency to oversee incidents involving the misrepresentation of 'a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.' Amid the investigation, the agency is also charged with either approving or rejecting a potential merger between Skydance and Paramount, which is valued at some $8 billion. Paramount Global has denied that the lawsuit had anything to do with the 'Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process," stating that it "will abide by the legal process.' But Bob Corn-Revere, chief legal counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit civil liberties group, said the FCC's deciding power in regard to the merger might make it more difficult for the media company to 'stand on legal principle.' The organization is representing Selzer in the lawsuit Trump filed against her. All the settlement does, he says, 'is show that bullying tactics sometimes work, but it doesn't change what the law is.' The $16 million Paramount is paying in the settlement will go to Trump's future presidential library, another aspect of the agreement that has raised concerns. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on Wednesday called for an investigation into Paramount and a potential breach of anti-bribery laws, saying the settlement appeared to be 'bribery in plain sight.' due to the pending merger. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon expressed a similar sentiment, calling on state prosecutors to 'make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court.' The FCC's lone Democratic commissioner, Anna M. Gomez, said in a statement on Wednesday that the settlement 'marks a dangerous precedent for the First Amendment, and it should alarm anyone who values a free and independent press.' Saying that 'the transcript and video of the 60 minutes interview show no evidence of wrongdoing,' Gomez asserted that 'this Paramount Payout is a desperate move to appease the Administration and secure regulatory approval of a major transaction currently pending before the FCC.' A group of conservative advocacy groups expressed its own concerns about the investigation, telling the FCC in March that while there are legitimate worries about conservative media being held to a different regulatory standard, the best thing for the agency to do was to drop the case and not pursue news distortion investigations into media content. The groups said they feared a ruling against CBS would be 'regulatory overreach' and could set a dangerous precedent.
