Public Hearing for the CSA
On Wednesday night, the City Council held a public hearing in City Hall for the Community Safety Act (CSA). The ultimate goal of the CSA is to hold Providence police officers accountable for their actions towards the citizens of this city. The Act's major points include a prohibition on racial and other forms of profiling, a standardized "stop-and-frisk" form that would require a legitimate reason for any stops, regulations on how police are able to videotape citizens, and a rule stating that police are not allowed to interfere with citizens who are videotaping them. The act also allows for citizens to request to be searched by an officer of a certain sex (because being frisked by a male officer can be triggering to those who have been raped by men, etc.), and access to a language hotline.The hearing itself was meant to provide space for citizens to voice their opinions concerning the act. Strikingly, not a single person who spoke (and probably not a single civilian who was in the room) was against the act. The room was resoundingly for the passing of the CSA.Speakers gave moving and often horrifying accounts of interactions with the Providence police in order to convince the three councilmen and the one councilwoman who were still on the fence about the CSA that they should vote "Yes." One of these Councilmen, John Igliozzi, was conspicuously absent.A 16-year-old Cambodian-American boy named Andy, a youth leader in PrYSM (Providence Youth Student Movement), was stopped, detained, handcuffed, searched, and questioned this summer because "[he] was hustling down the street wearing a hoodie." It should be noted that he was wearing this exact same outfit at the hearing. While exercising his right to deny an unreasonable search, "six or seven squad cars with ten or eleven officers in them came for one 16-year-old boy of color." These officers also repeatedly asked him which gang he represented. He finished by asking the City Councilors to pass the CSA because he and his friends are all sick of being racially profiled.John Prince, an African-American man, was standing in his doorway recording police officers who were outside of his home "questioning" a woman on his street. These officers, upon noticing Mr. Prince and his phone, asked him why he was filming them, and when he tried to go inside and close his door, the officers jumped over his fence. They proceeded to illegally enter his home, pin him down on his living room floor, and arrest him. He closed by saying, "You ask me if I feel safe? No, I don't feel safe. Hold them accountable."
An image from the hearing. Notice that there are three police officers in this picture.
Bernardo de la Cruz, a Latino man accompanied by a translator, is sick of police officers acting like ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents. The CSA would prohibit the police from asking for ID without probable cause. As mentioned above, the act would also provide for public interpreters. The police came to Mr. de la Cruz's home last year looking for his son, who does not live with him, and did not give him any information about why they were there. None of the officers spoke Spanish and "they refused to find [him] an interpreter." He explained, "The police treated me like a hostage in my own home." Another man, Eduardo Sandoval, also speaking with an interpreter, commented, "We recognize that police officers must have a lot of work to do so they really shouldn't be taking on the duties of ICE agents."Another woman, whose name I didn't catch simply walked up to the microphone, immediately began to yell very loudly in Spanish into it, and then turned around to the crowd and said in English, "If we have the funding for six, eight, ten police officers to be at this hearing, we have the funding for public interpreters."Next, Mary Kay Harris, a councilwomen who supports the CSA, spoke, imploring her fellow council members to vote yes on the CSA. "This is clearly what our community wants," she said.
An image of Councilwoman Harris speaking. Look. They got new cops to take over for the old ones. So many police officers and yet no interpreters!!
The final vote on the CSA has yet to be scheduled, but the ways you can help are by calling Mayor Elorza and by calling your City Councilor to voice your support for the CSA!