Several hundred people gathered on the State House steps in Providence Wednesday to protest the killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year old Black man, by a police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. The gathering also comes as the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, continues in Minneapolis.
“We’re here because Daunte Wright was murdered by a senior officer, 10 miles away from where George Floyd was murdered,” said Harrison Tuttle, executive director of the Black Lives Matter Rhode Island Political Action Committee, which organized the demonstration. “This is a continued cycle of oppression and murder, and in my opinion, a slow genocide.”
This summer, some ten thousand people demonstrated at the Statehouse, as protests occurred nationwide calling for racial justice. The events were spurred, in part, by the killing of Floyd.
On Wednesday, Tuttle and others advocated for the reallocation of money from police departments to other agencies, and for changing the way police officers respond to residents’ needs.
“We must have a radical change of thought on how we police our community,” Tuttle said.
The rally came in the same week that the city of Providence released an analysis of the city’s public safety budget, encompassing both the police and fire departments. The analysis found that more than half the police department’s dispatch calls requiring response were for non-violent, non criminal matters, “including behavioral health.”
“You know, if someone has a mental health problem, that they need to be responded, not by a police officer, but someone who is trained to deal with someone that has mental health problems,” Tuttle said. “These concepts are very simple. They’re very logical. And there are progressive legislators here that agree.”
As a political activist, Tuttle said he wants to shift Rhode Island government policies leftward.
“What’s going on in this state, currently, is a battle between, ‘Democrats’ and ‘progressives.’ You have these moderate Democrats, who are centrist in nature, who seek to continue to keep the way things are, right, because that benefits them politically and financially.”
“What progressives in this state are trying to do is they’re trying to be able to radically change the way we view policing,” he said. “But that comes down to how we treat people.”
The rally also occurred amid a shifting political landscape in Rhode Island. Former Providence City Council President Sabina Matos, was sworn in as the state’s lieutenant governor on Wednesday. Governor Daniel McKee took over in March after Gina Raimondo left to serve in the Biden administration as Commerce Secretary.
“The governor has shown a great ability to be able to listen to what I believe is probably not where he looks politically, but he’s done a very good job of being able to hear different voices,” Tuttle said. “And hopefully the governor listens to Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos”.
Tuttle and other speakers encouraged attendees to get involved politically, including by running for office. Two of the speakers were David Morales, a progressive Democratic state representative, and Luis Daniel Muñoz, who is running for governor as a Democrat in 2022.
Editor’s note: a previous version of this article misspelled Daunte Wright’s name. The article has been changed to reflect that.
