UPDATE: Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steve Pare told RI Future, “we’re pretty sure that isn’t a Providence police officer. We are checking today to see if we made any arrests related to what was depicted on the video.”

Pare said he became aware of the video yesterday. “We don’t know when this video was taken,” he said on Thursday morning. “We’re looking back over the last several nights, but if this is several months old it will be harder to identify.”

UPDATE: Paré’s assistant, Margaret Botelho email me that, “… the Providence Police Department was not involved in this incident.”

Lt. Michael Chalek of the URI police department said he hadn’t seen the video yet and indicated he wasn’t aware of such an incident. He said he would know more after watching the video. Calls to the head of URI security went unanswered.

UPDATE: There was no arrest record for the incident Monday night, but there was a rescue vehicle dispatched to the scene around 9pm, according to the Providence Fire Department. For medical confidentiality reasons the identity of the person taken from the scene could not be revealed.

Posted by Willie Vanover Jr., the cellphone video appears to show two officers attempting to control and cuff a man laying down on the sidewalk as a third officer stands with his foot on the suspect’s hip. At about 54 seconds into the video, the third officer appears to remove his foot, and then kick the suspect in the side. Seconds later the suspect is hauled to his feet and lead away.

The officer who kicked the suspect stays behind.

The video on Facebook lacks extensive description save for, “Downtown providence security at the school across from dunkin doughnut wtf is this clown stomping this man for please help me make this go viral.”

This post will updated as new information is available.

Reverend Joyce Penfield, of the St. Peter’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Providence, has been fighting for racial and social justice her entire life. “It’s been my calling since I was 13,” she said.

Her father was a leader of the local Lutheran church in Phylo, Illinois – “I lived in a cornfield, honestly,” she said, by way of describing Phylo’s rural character – and the congregation decided it didn’t want to rent out a church property for fear of potentially attracting a black tenant. “But you raised me to love everyone,” Penfield remembers arguing with her father at the time.

“I believed what they taught me about Jesus,” Penfield told me, “that you are supposed to love everyone – especially those who have been left behind.”

She graduated high school in 1964 and became active in the Civil Rights Movement. She became a minister and considered studying at the Chicago Theological Seminary, where Jesse Jackson was educated. She joined the Peace Corp and did several stints, over the years, in Nigeria. She married a Nigerian man and became active with the NAACP when their biracial children experienced discrimination from the police in New Jersey.

When she moved to Rhode Island in 2001 she became the Episcopal minister at the ACI, and immediately realized a need for post-prison rehabilitative programs. The recidivism rate at the time, she said, was about 65 percent.

“If you have a product that is successful only 35 percent of the time, that’s not very good,” Penfield said. “But nobody cares about prisoners because they create jobs. I began to see the real problem. There wasn’t any place for them to go and there wasn’t any help for them. There are so many roadblocks people encounter when they first get out of jail. They might have lost friends, they probably lost their job.”

So in 2004, she created The Blessing Way, a halfway house for homeless former inmates trying to stay sober.

“We’re a bridge to integrating back into the community,” Penfield said. “We’re almost like a shelter, but a little bit better. We help people fly on their own.”

Physically, the Blessing Way is a three-story apartment building on the property of the St. Peter’s and St. Andrew’s Church where Penfield preaches. Rooms are rented to former inmates in exchange for staying sober, finding work and putting their lives back together – all of which the Blessing Way offers help with.

“We have life skills classes, financial management, emotional development,” Penfield said, describing some of the services Blessing Way offers its clients. There are job skills training sessions and a program that puts people to work in the community as day laborers and carpenters. Last year DARE spoke to residents about the Ban The Box law that prevents employers from asking about arrest records on job applications. Residents are required to attend drug counseling, and random drug tests.

“There are myriad roadblocks people encounter when they get out of jail,” she said. “Anyone would be weighed down. If there are addiction troubles or mental illness, it’s a miracle when people can do it on their own.”

A zero tolerance policy on drugs is necessary, Penfield said. “You must be severe and they have to leave … they trigger everyone else around them.” And, she added, “the next day you’re going to have everyone in prison thinking you’re a crack house.”

From 2006 to 2012 153 people have gone through the Blessing Way program, Penfield said, and 61 percent of men graduated as did about 58 percent of the women. She assumes men do better because the availability of manual labor jobs makes it easier for men to find post-prison employment.

The beds aren’t always full at the Blessing Way. That’s partly because of the strict no drugs or alcohol policy, and partly because it can’t always afford to take in new residents. The program operates on a very small budget, and only some of the staff take a paycheck. Penfield does not, but there are a few former residents who earn a small stipend for helping out. Penfield has housing through the church but only gets paid for 10 hours a week. She’s essentially experiencing the same poverty as are the residents of the Blessing Way.

But rather than give up, she’s expanding her focus. Penfield told me recently she looks forward to working more directly on matters of racial justice and police brutality. Today, she is speaking at a Stop the Violence prayer vigil with “faith, community and law enforcement leaders” who “will lead us in a prayer and share a commitment to justice, safety, respect and dignity for everyone,” according to a press release.

She said this tack is part of another new chapter for her.

“I think god is calling me to work with our white brothers and sisters, to help them become more aware of how we’ve unconsciously held onto our privileges,” Penfield said. “Call it white supremacy if you will, that’s really what it is.”

But she isn’t trying to shame anyone, not even the police officers she works closely with on these and other issues. In fact, she seems to approach the topic of police brutality with the same compassion and convictions that she practices with her Blessing Way work.

“I try to see every person as a beautiful flower,” she said, “and maybe some of us just need some watering.”

An African-American woman in Texas, Sandra Bland, was found dead in jail last week. A policeman had pulled her over for not signaling as she changed lanes, but that traffic stop last Friday ended with her being arrested.  The next day, she called her family from the local Texas jail, worried that the arresting officer might have fractured her arm. Like many people who suffer police-inflicted injuries under circumstances that raise questions, she was charged with “assaulting a public servant”.

As her Facebook account shows, she spoke out often on racial issues, and what I’ve heard suggests that she spoke equally freely during her traffic stop, which it seems is something that a lot of police officers really dislike. Now, I don’t want to rule out the police version of the story: maybe this woman, who had done nothing wrong besides changing lanes once without signalling, did somehow decide to use force against the police officer, despite all the precautions that police take to keep themselves maximally safe during a traffic stop.  Or maybe she did something else that made him mad. Anyway, the officer chose to arrest her with considerable violence, in an arrest caught on video.  As the public servant who she is accused of assaulting arrested her so forcibly, she said:

“Hey! You just slammed my head to the
ground!” she yells. “You do not even care
about that? I can’t even hear!”

“All of this for a traffic signal!” she
continued, telling the passerby filming,
“Thank you for recording! Thank you!”

As the media later said, she yelled.  She was someone who was willing to yell in a situation like that.  Maybe something like that is what got her charged with assaulting the public servant.  In any case, she was arrested last Friday and not released — with bond set at $5000 for assaulting a public servant — which meant that she was still in jail three days later on Monday, when she was found hanging in her cell, with her death reported as a suicide.

Her family says Sandy Bland would never have killed herself. They say she had many who loved her, and she had just moved back to her hometown to start a new job at the college she graduated from.  She seems to have been a decent person — the things she was yelling as she was being arrested help show this, I think.  She repeatedly shows her gratitude to the bystander who’s taking the video, she’s surprised and indignant when the public servant seems not to care about the pain he’s causing.  Would someone like that have hung herself in her cell after a few days in jail?  If so, that would raise serious questions in itself about what was done to her.

But yes, there was something she was clearly pretty unhappy about, despite also having considerable happiness in her life.  She said it on Facebook before her arrest:

Being a black person in America is very, very hard. Show me in American history where all lives matter.

Whether this often leads people to suicide is a statistical issue (and I think the statistics on that say something great about black women as a group).  But I want to drop statistics and listen to what Sandra Bland said.  Did her unhappiness about how black people are treated, which she expressed so freely, somehow lead to her death?  One way or another, it definitely did.  The regime of jail was not good for this woman who wanted to speak for herself, or she was not good for it.  She didn’t fit in the system.  Perhaps the problem was that this woman was even in this system we have.

The sheriff’s office says, in their statement on how she came to be hanging in a cell, that it “appears to be self-inflicted asphyxiation”.  Maybe she did it with her own hands even though, as I mentioned, she was worried her arm was fractured.  During her arrest, as the public servant with his knees on her back was pulling her arms up behind her, she yelled “I can’t feel my arms!”  I wonder if she ever got enough treatment in jail for her injured arms before, as they say, she killed herself.

In jail there are no videos taken by passersby; they take away anything that could be used for that.  That’s why we can see what happened at the end of her arrest but we can’t see what happened at the end of her life, when she ended up strung up in a cell.  This kind of thing is why it should not be easy for police to place someone into custody. Those who believe in civil rights are commonly seen working to make it less easy for police to take someone into custody based on a pretext or a weak reason; we’ve all seen the way civil-rights supporters do that, and I guess Sandra Bland’s death is a good example of why it needs to be done.  There isn’t conclusive evidence to prove what happened in her case, but what I’ve heard is certainly enough to make me wonder. And I want to repeat the two questions Sandra Bland asked — they’re worth bringing up again. One question is the one she asked the public servant who was arresting her:

“Hey! You just slammed my head to the
ground!” she yells. “You do not even care
about that?”

That question wasn’t answered, but it’s pretty clear what the answer would be.  The other question is the one she left on her Facebook page from before she was arrested:

“Show me in American history where all lives matter.”

That one hasn’t been answered yet either. Can we change what the answer is?

This was in Texas, not Rhode Island, but I don’t want to make this about trashing Texas; different areas of the country have similar problems and we need to work together to overcome them.  There are racial issues and there are police issues; Sandra Bland’s death brings up both in an important way, which is why I’m bringing it up on this site. One petition for her is here, calling for the federal government to take over the case.

#JusticeForSandy

• Video from Friday night’s #ThisStopsToday protest
• Photos from Friday night’s #ThisStopsToday protest

I have footage of all that in another post, but for now, let’s hear from the two speakers who opened the march.

“To say that ‘black lives matter’ seems to be a revolutionary belief in a nation where the possibility that a young black man may have stolen some cigarettes or that some self-appointed watchman was scared enough is enough to justify the murders of black bodies…”

“Why is success being quantified as a simple linear equation, hard work plus motivation equals success? Why do we not consider the other factors like race, gender, class that affect this so-called path? Michael Brown’s mother did everything she could for her son. Together they worked hard tirelessly so that he could have the opportunity to attend college where previously there was none. But in the matter of a few minutes, that did not matter. It didn’t matter that he studied. It didn’t matter that he applied. It didn’t matter that he did the work. In a matter of seconds he was nothing more than a black body…”

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Friday night’s #ThisStopsToday march through downtown Providence was filled with excitement and drama.

The march and rally was held to draw attention to the violence against black and brown persons being perpetrated across the country by police departments that routinely engage in racial profiling and police brutality. Many see the problem as systemic, that is, racism is cooked into policing so completely that you can’t have one without the other.

• Photos from Friday night’s #ThisStopsToday protest
• Voices from Friday nights’ #ThisStopsToday protest

So protesters took to the streets of Providence, and at one point made an abortive attempt to shut down the highway as they did on November 25th. Though it has been reported elsewhere that the Providence Police and the State Police repelled the protesters, in truth it was the protesters themselves that prevented the shutdown. The video below is from two cameras, the first by me, the second by Adam Miner. You will see some protesters jump the fence, but many in the crowd call them back, saying, “It’s too soon!” and “the energy isn’t right.” By the time the police arrive, the protesters are already working their way back to the fence.

The first of the two “Die-Ins” was staged at the corner of Empire St and Washington, near Trinity Rep. The two videos below are the same event from two cameras. The second camera was operated by Adam Miner.

More dramatic was the second Die-In at the corner of Memorial Blvd and Francis St, in front of the highway on-ramp near the Providence Place Mall. Here the protesters lay on the ground, thumping their chests to the rhythm of a heartbeat.

“That’s a heartbeat,” said an organizer, “something we have the privilege of hearing. Other people don’t.”

After the second Die-In the protesters attempted to enter the Providence Place Mall. This is when the Providence Police became physical, strong arming the protesters out the door and physically preventing their entry. This might have been the most fraught moment of the evening, from my perspective.

A lot has been said about the irresponsibility of the protesters in blocking the roads, or blocking the highways in regards to delaying or preventing ambulances from being able to respond to emergencies. Last night the protesters encountered an ambulance, and their reaction is worth noting:

By now I’ve spoken to several people who were on the highway on November 25th. They tell me that when the police first arrived on the scene the protesters tried to negotiate an open lane for emergency vehicles, but the police refused to negotiate.

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Protesters took to the streets of Providence Friday night in an entirely peaceful #ThisStopsToday march through downtown. Here are some photos from the event.

• Video from Friday night’s #ThisStopsToday protest
• Voices from Friday nights’ #ThisStopsToday protest

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The organizers, the response of the police, the extent of the press coverage and the racial makeup of the attendees was not the same as last week. Even some of the subtleties concerning the goals of the protest were different, though to be clear, the main goal was to challenge racism, racial profiling, militarized policing and police murder of people of color.

The crowd started to build around 7pm at Burnside Park, with marchers working on their signs in the park with the materials provided by the organizers. There were less marchers this time and the crowd tended to be whiter, though there was substantial representation of people of color.

There was more of a police presence this time around. The police were never far away, and though they never interfered with the protesters, they made sure to let their presence be known.

Organizer Rebecca Nieves McGoldrick addressed the crowd in Burnside Park and said that given the events of last week, tonight was going to be a “pretty calm and peaceful protest,” by which I took her to mean that there were not going to be any arrests or provocative actions like flag burning or highway blocking. She was true to her word.

The plan was to rally at Burnside Park, march past the Providence Place Mall and to the steps of the State House, where there would be a four minute moment of silence for Mike Brown (one minute for every hour his body laid in the street) and then a “speak out” in which anyone could step forward and let loose whatever was on their mind.

The march through downtown and to the state house was guided by the police, whose red and blue lights provided an almost stereoscopic illumination. There were chants of “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “This is what democracy looks like” among others. There were many signs of support from passing motorists and mall patrons, but also one or two negative reactions.

Upon approaching the mall, I was amused to note that the police were blocking the highway on ramp, which I assume was meant to prevent protesters from storming up the ramp and blocking the highway a second time.

The big surprise of the evening was finding, upon our arrival at the State House, a phalanx of police officers standing at the top of the state house steps, protecting the building. It was an intimidating reminder of police power to have between 15 and 20 armed officers silently observe the protest from on high.

There was a solemn and somber four minutes of silence, interrupted only by the occasional chime of an unmuted cellphone, then the speak out began. I’ll have a rundown of what the speakers spoke about in a later post, after I’ve sorted out all the video, but for now let me present some highlights.

This march was organized to draw parallels and solidarity between what’s happening in the United States, where abuses of police power against black and brown people is a growing problem, and the terrible situation in Mexico, where the militarized drug war and an a destabilized government is resulting in the murder and disappearance of young protesters. Police forces in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico murdered six people and “disappeared” 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa.

The growing militarization of police forces and the crackdown on human rights is world wide, from Hong Kong to Mexico to Ferguson.

The organizers of this protest put it succinctly:

“We are calling for the demilitarization of police. We are calling for police and government transparency and accountability. We are calling for an end to the drug war. We are calling for an end to neo-liberal policies that increase economic inequality and disenfranchise indigenous people and people of color. We are calling for an end to systems of institutionalized racial oppression. We are calling for justice.”

As the night wore on, and a light drizzle of rain and dropping temperatures thinned the crowd of protesters, over twenty people participated in the speak out. For the most part the listeners were polite and patient, and everyone who wanted to speak had their chance.

The last 20 or 30 protesters then turned to the silent police officers and handful of reporters who toughed it out to the end and waved farewell.

Like last week’s protest, this was a positive, cathartic experience, continuing the conversation around race and police violence. Legislators and elected officials take notice: things are changing.

But what of the voices of the protest? I can’t claim to have any special insights. I can only present what ten of the 400 to 500 protesters said that night, before the protest started. Think of me working here as a megaphone, amplifying their voices.

This is what Democracy looks like.

“I’m tired of turning on the news and seeing people get shot down for something that is not right…”

“This is a lesson for all of us in our community: Stop killing our people!”

“I’m here because it’s time for colonialism to end. It’s time to have an honest dialog about the history of the United States of America, about how it’s built on a system of injustice…”

“I’d just like to show respect to a few other names that are on the list of slain, young black men by police officers…”

“Young people, get into politics. Call your local officials. Let them know what troubles you. Then vote! Then, run for office….”

“That’s  literal and metaphorical. We want to surround our youth with the protection they need to survive in this capitalist system…”

“The images the media is trying to portray of him [Michael Brown] is a total lie. I knew him. He was totally a gentle giant.”

“We’re all affected by this because we found out about it on social media. CNN’s not telling us all of it. We’re seeing it live, we’re seeing it on Instagram, we’re seeing it on Twitter…”

“We can change everything with this power that we have. We have new tools that they didn’t have the last time we had to do this, in the sixties. We have grandparents who are alive now who are saying, that this looks the same, but it’s in color…”

“I want to take this moment to talk about the statement ‘Black Lives Matter.’ When I heard this list of names being read out earlier, it was all black, cisgender men… It is crucial that we honor not just the black men who have been killed, but also the black women and girls…”

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After a long march, we found ourselves at the Providence Public Safety Complex, where police officers blocked the entrance, and the protesters proceeded to demonstrate outside. After doing chalk outlines on the pavement like those drawn around murder victims, and after burning an American Flag, (which would surely have been the most controversial moment of the night, had the protesters not taken the highway) there was a small moment of silence as the protesters tried to reach consensus as to what to do next.

Someone said, “We could block the highway.” It sounded like an afterthought.

The statement electrified the crowd.

Almost immediately the crowd dispersed, and a significant number of them, between 100 and 150 by my count, crossed the street towards the highway, jumped the fence, and descended onto the highway en masse.

I might have followed, but I was burdened with a backpack, a video camera on a tripod, and a still camera around my neck. Also, I wasn’t entirely sure I could climb back.

I saw the protesters successfully block southbound traffic, and watched as they attempted to block northbound traffic as well. A state police car appeared almost immediately, and as more and more troopers arrived, they managed to keep the north bound lane clear. I watched from a patch of grass that runs along the outside of the fenced highway, about the width of a sidewalk.

A police officer unsuccessfully tried to tell those on the legal side of the fence that they had to move away, but I held my place, because I was trying to get the incident on video. I was warned several times that I would be arrested if I stayed where I was, but I was breaking no laws. (and was not arrested.)

Down below, on the highway, the protesters were confronting the police. I was told the following by a person who was down there, a white male:

“It was crazy. There were like five of us, three white guys and two black guys. The police, when they came at us, went right after the black guys. They weren’t interested in me at all, and I was right there.”

The police started to make arrests. I’m not sure what the criteria for who was arrested and who was not. I saw at least two people being arrested, but I was constantly being jostled by fence hoppers (now passing both ways) and being pushed from behind by police officers attempting to clear the fence, so I apologize for the shaky footage.

Soon the police corralled the protesters off the highway and then shouted and yelled for them to get on the other side of the fence or be arrested. The police officers were either very angry or pretending to be. There was only a certain speed at which that many people could hop over a fence, and screams and threats were not going to make it go any faster.

After the highway was cleared, I learned that six people had been arrested – four by state troopers and two by Providence police. One young man wearing a white hoodie, was pointed out by the police, who proceeded to surround and restrain him, over the protests of the crowd. The officers put the young man into the back of a police cruiser, but the opposite window of the cruiser was rolled down, so the man jumped through the window and made a run for it.

Here are my photos:

***
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