“The majority of arrests are actually nonviolent crimes, particularly those related to drugs, sex work, and undocumented labor. It is no secret that these are criminalized as a way to target oppressed people…“

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A few days ago, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza announced a plan to examine the potential for reparations for Black and Indigenous people within the city. Councilmember Mary Kay Harris, and other Black activists within Providence, have recently been expressing plenty of support for the concept of reparations, but little faith in the systems that plan to implement such a policy.

I’m here to make the case for police abolition, for all the people who can’t today. Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, the many Black and Brown victims whose deaths established such a movement in the first place; for George Floyd and Leroy Martinez and Wayne Reyes and any other victims of Derek Chauvin who went unrecorded; for Tony McDade who shared my identity as a transmasculine victim of police violence, and for Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery who shared little in common with me aside from their human dignity and right to breathe; for those who were unable to catch the crimes of this unstable militia on camera before they died. The deaths are insurmountable, and I catch myself listing all of the ones I know until I am forced to realize there are thousands, maybe millions others. Our entire country is founded on an Indigenous graveyard and a slave plantation, and maintains itself through those structures even today, but I only know the hundred or so names that garnered the most attention.

The case for police abolition is not some vague concept. I am not asking for the removal of guns from the pockets of policemen, I am not asking for the removal of the word Plantations from the name of our small state, I am not asking for statues to be torn down or mascots to be changed or TV shows to be censored, though these are all some pleasant little concessions that were always involved in the endgame of an antiracist society. Nevertheless, Providence needs to make sure that our representatives in office don’t think we’ll back down with such compromises and red herrings. And reparations are intriguing, though when it comes into Providence, one of the most segregated cities in the nation, a place where the Providence Public School System abuses students of color and National Grid poisons black neighborhoods, the promise of it comes off as insincere and lacking substance. I am not even asking for defunding the police, a term that implies any funds should remain for whatever “protective duties” we are convinced they serve.

To be very blatant, I was born in the heart of Kentucky, I saw the KKK marching down the streets of Lexington in few numbers yet surrounded by police well before white power militias in Charlottesville went viral, and all I knew the police to be as a child was the protectorate of the fascists and white supremacists that terrorized my neighborhood. And I grew up to be the person that the police despised most, the activist that was held at gunpoint at protests, the sexual abuse survivor that was laughed at in a cop car, the kid who talked too loud at school lunches and was too openly trans in classrooms. Because of my poverty, because of my neighborhood, because of my sex at one point and my gender at another. Because I said that Black, Indigenous, and trans people deserve the human dignity the cops occasionally extended to me when they saw me as a cisgender heterosexual white male. The only difference between me and Tony McDade is that with my shade of skin, the cop put his gun down. THAT is where my resentment roots itself, in the knowledge that even when I was extended every privilege I could possibly assimilate myself into, the slightest political misstep meant a gun to my chest and the intention to kill.

In the early 1800s, United States slave owners and politicians focused on how to maintain the institution of slavery, rather than to keep it as efficient as possible. This led to the creation of slave patrols, an early version of the police state. The primary task of slave patrols was to prevent and quash slave rebellions and revolts, and to capture runaway slaves either to resell them, return them to their former plantation, or kill them. Post Civil War, slaveowners received reparations for their “lost property”, and the United States government wrote into the constitution that slavery was illegal unless under the conditions that someone had committed a crime.

And from that day forth, as white America knew it, racism was solved and they could all go home.

The problem is police are still slave patrols. Black rights activists in the modern day aren’t bringing up such a history just to piss off white people or make anyone feel guilty. But our prisons are run for profit either for corporations or the state, and they force prisoners to do grueling labor from firefighting to construction work for cents per hour. Slavery continues, and the police enforce it. They quash and prevent black rights protests and Capitol Hill Autonomous Zones, and they hunt down Black, Indigenous, and trans people to imprison, deport, bankrupt, or kill us. It is all too familiar to the purpose slave patrols once served.

This process happens far from the comfortable white Christian suburbs cops and politicians house themselves in, far from Mattiello and Ruggerio (who took $30,950 and $28,575 in cop union money, respectively). But the crimes of police are still shown on their TVs, and their distance is not an excuse, it’s only an explanation for their willful ignorance.

So what of the violent crime that police are tasked with solving? How could I say that police are unnecessary, and let murderers and rapists and thieves roam the streets untamed?

Around 30-40% of murders go unsolved. Around 1% of rape accusations ever leads to a conviction. And if you’ve ever been robbed, you know for a fact that the police don’t care unless you’re a white business owner in a neighborhood that provides a solid share of taxes for the city.

If we’re being honest, police have a legacy of using their power to rape and steal particularly on reservations. Police are infamous for kidnapping girls and women from reservations and taking them off of sovereign land to sexually assault them. Hence the term Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). Police are also legally permitted to steal civilian property for “any just cause” they see fit, which often includes money and jewelry. This is a completely legal process called civil forfeiture. They carry guns, tasers, violent dogs they’ve trained through abuse, batons, they are trained for the potential to kill, they are taught that they are superior over regular citizens and that their purpose is to control us. We see that every day when Black and Brown people, trans and intersex people, are shot in cold blood. For some, we see it blatantly in our neighborhoods as we see the sun rising in the morning. For others, they see Black men shot on the news told to them like a weather update. Either way, it is a constant presence of aggression and cruelty that has become impossible to ignore.

The majority of arrests are actually nonviolent crimes, particularly those related to drugs, sex work, and undocumented labor. It is no secret that these are criminalized as a way to target oppressed people. We can see that when 19% of sex workers are trans women and only 3% are men, and bills like SESTA/FOSTA that claim to protect sexual abuse survivors only make the lives of sex workers harder. We can see that when, despite evidence showing black and indigenous people are about as active in drug use as white people, they are still the majority of arrests for drug-related offenses, while the only licensed cannabis shop in the state is run by the Governor’s husband. We can see that when it’s a crime for immigrants to just not have filled out the paperwork to live in this country.

So the police mostly arrest for false incrimination and nonviolent crimes, and rarely give any attention to the violent crimes that we are so convinced they’re protecting us from. Most of the time, they are the ones committing violent and horrendous acts on our streets, and either being protected by the courts or permitted to commit criminal acts by the law. It seems like the only people that the police intend on protecting are corporations, the white rich, and of course their brothers in arms the KKK.

What can we do about that? Take away their guns, when George Floyd was never shot? Ban chokeholds, and pretend that Derek Chauvin was just some well-meaning cop that used the wrong method of law enforcement? Give cops more trainings, where they’ll learn how to kill us more efficiently? No matter what happens, their jobs will always involve sending massive populations to government-regulated slavery. It seems like there is no perfect solution.

We’re not asking for weak concessions and empty speeches. Whether you call this state a Plantation or Wampanoag and Narragansett land, it will always be an institution of slavery until we dismantle this entire criminal justice system. We are telling politicians, billionaires, precincts, every person on this planet, that SOMETHING needs to fundamentally change. Providence needs to abolish the police, NOW.