Anusha Alles is a community organizer and non-profit leader who advocates for racial, economic and gender justice. Anusha is based in Providence, Rhode Island (RI) and is the former staff organizer for the Behind The Walls Committee, an ongoing campaign that is embedded within the larger Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) organization. Founded in 1986-1988, DARE partners with community members and other grassroots organizations to achieve its mission of organizing low-income families in communities of color to secure economic, racial and political justice. Currently, DARE leads two major campaigns, the Tenant and Homeowner Association and the Behind The Walls Committee. Both the Tenant and Homeowner Association and the Behind The Walls Committee are led by members of the community who collaborate with DARE staffers to advocate for policies and practices that promote equity. The Tenant and Homeowner Association uses its platform to challenge and prevent evictions, foreclosures, predatory lending services and practices, divestment, gentrification and displacement in low and middle income communities of color. Similarly, The Behind The Walls Committee focuses its work in low and middle income communities and includes members who have been directly or indirectly impacted by incarceration. They have successfully organized to expand voting rights to formerly incarcerated people, prohibit potential employers from requiring applicants to disclose their criminal record and increase access to housing opportunities for formerly incarcerated people.
Anusha was interviewed by Shereece Rankine in 2022. This interview has been edited for length.
Shereece Rankine 00:00:00
Thank you again, Anusha. I really appreciate your time. We’ll start off with you just giving a quick little introduction as to who you are and the organization that you work with, and we can launch into the questions from there.
Anusha Alles 00:00:1
Okay. My name is Anusha Alles, I use she/her pronouns, and I work at Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), where I organize with the Behind The Walls Committee, which is one of two committees currently operating at DARE. DARE started about 36 years ago; we just had our 35 anniversary celebration, but really, it’s been 36 years. Behind The Walls is a committee that started over two decades ago, and centers people impacted by incarceration. They’ve worked on a lot of different campaigns over the years and have a lot of different victories, like winning ban the box and voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, housing access, and employment access. I’ve been working at DARE for three years as an organizer with the Behind The Walls Committee and before that, I was a volunteer member of the Tenants and Homeowners Association, which is our other committee that focuses on housing justice.
Shereece Rankine 00:01:24
Okay, thank you. Just to get into the questions, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the scope of DARE’s response to the killing of George Floyd.
Anusha Alles 00:01:42
So when George Floyd was murdered, there was a lot going on, because the pandemic had started and our building was shut down. I think at the time, we were trying to do supply distribution to our members, because our members are all Black folks and other people of color; working class folks. A lot of folks have health issues, and don’t have access to good health care. So it was a very stressful time already for us. And so we were in the middle of COVID response around our community members, and also around our incarcerated community members. We were really worried about an outbreak happening in the prison and so we were a part of coalition work with a lot of other folks who were trying to put pressure on the state and on the prison administration to take really basic steps to just make sure that community members would be safe inside. They didn’t do the majority of the things that we asked them to do, and there was a massive outbreak several months later in which almost everybody in one facility got COVID. So, we were already in the middle of so much and then when George Floyd was murdered, there was this massive organic uprising that happened all over the country, but in Providence too, and most of it was youth led. It was by youth who were using social media to organize folks and organize these really gigantic protests. And so, the first part of our response was just trying to support those youth in doing that work, and making sure that they would be safe, because overnight basically, a Facebook event was turning into like a 10,000 people protest. So at that time, a lot of what we did was just reaching out to folks trying to make sure that people had basic training around their legal rights; and how to deal with police presence and how to deal with something like if they got tear gassed; doing jail support trainings for folks, doing medic trainings — well, we weren’t able to do a full medic training, but just emergency street safety training. We worked with a lot of our partners like PrYSM, to try to do those training for youths pretty quickly, and just to try to make sure that people would be safe at those protests. The other piece of what we did once those protests slowly started to die down (because there was a gigantic one first and there was a slightly smaller one)– at that point, we were also trying to think about, well, how do we channel all of this energy that people have right now? There’s this mass uprising, people are just mobilizing themselves right now, and are ready for change and want change, and how can we channel that into existing campaigns and work for racial justice campaigns fighting the police systems in Providence?
For DARE and Behind The Walls, we basically started to incorporate asks around defunding into our larger demands around the prison. So the entire time while we were talking about the situation with COVID in the prison, we always wanted to make it clear that we’re not just asking for the basic safety, and basic human rights for people in prison, we’re also pushing for a long term abolition of prisons. We didn’t want the messaging to be like people deserve to be in prison, but you need to give them masks. It was like incarcerated people’s lives matter. And we want to think about this as an opportunity to start decarcerating the population. So, one of the big things that prisons could do to minimize the possibility of an outbreak was to reduce the prison population. So reduce the number of people that you’re arresting, reduce the number of people that you’re holding, reduce the number of people who are there on violations, or just waiting for court dates, and releasing people on parole if they were eligible for parole, making sure people are getting good time. So the defunding police energy, it really just fit right into everything we were already thinking about, because we were already thinking long term. The COVID pandemic was an opportunity to start thinking about how can we start depopulating prisons and how do we start shifting away from that, and part of that is also defunding the police and defunding an institution that is locking up our people and leaving them sitting in cages vulnerable to this disease. So, we started incorporating that into our work more, into our demands. I can actually show you this flyer that we put together at the time. I can give this to you, too, if you want. So, “Knock It Off” was the name of the COVID campaign, and as you can see, we incorporated a specific demand around defund and divest. It says that the governor 2021 budget proposes 230 million just to incarcerate 2,600 people. Providence’s 2021 budget dedicates 88 million for policing. Stop spending public funds on violent systems that harm us. Real safety in our communities means access to life affirming resources, like housing and health care, and not people in cages. So we have tried to make it very clear how these things are connected, because often what we see is that there is more excitement around showing up to protest police violence, and it’s much harder to mobilize people around folks who are incarcerated. I think partly it might be that folks were incarcerated or sort of out of sight, but we just wanted to make it really clear that this movement to defund the police and George Floyd’s murder is part of a larger system of mass incarceration of policing and incarcerating people. The other side of this flyer was just safety tips for protests. So, we put together basic tips for people in terms of keeping themselves safe while this was happening. We then organized our own protest around the Providence City Council meeting that was happening. The city council met, and they were discussing the budget and several organizers, different folks in the community, different organizations, including PrYSM, started organizing around that city council meeting. So we put together a slate of people to speak at that meeting and to present a defund police agenda and the logic behind it. From there, we had a member from Behind The Walls, Alexis Morales, who spoke about just his experiences with the police assaulting him, assaulting his friends, just how normal that is in Providence. The police are assaulting people on a regular basis and it’s normalized and people either don’t know that that’s happening or just accept it as just a part of life in these neighborhoods. So he talked about that, and just made the point that this isn’t just about a bad apple; this isn’t just about one cop. And there were several other folks who spoke as well. Charlotte Abotsi, she’s a black woman who is a local organizer. She’s not affiliated with any particular organization. She does this work on her own and she’s also a poet, an artist, organizer, and just a brilliant person and she also spoke. People presented on different aspects of this, talking about the history of policing, talking about their experiences in Providence.
And we had a big protest that happened at City Hall simultaneously wherein hundreds of people gathered at City Hall in Burnside Park. We also had a speaker program happening in Burnside park at the same time with local organizers. Also, when the City Council testimony started, we broadcast that into the park so that people in the park could hear folks because they couldn’t go into the room because again, this was happening during the beginning of the COVID pandemic. COVID has also been used repeatedly to try to shut down community protests, because they basically say, well, “we can’t let anybody into this room” and they’ve done the same thing with the courthouse. They have nobody wearing masks in the courthouse, but they constantly use COVID as an excuse to keep out community members from coming in to support people going to the court. So they were doing the same thing with the city council meeting where they wouldn’t allow anybody into the room but we had hundreds of people outside listening and supporting the folks who were inside testifying. So, we did that action. After that, I think the organizing just wasn’t very organized. I think at that point there were all these different people who were trying to work on this, either people who had existing campaigns around the police, who were trying to channel this energy, or people doing other work that was related to it, like Behind The Walls, or people who were just new to the organizing like some of these young people who saw what was happening and threw themselves into it. Some of them actually started their own organization called Gen Z. So at that point, it started to get a little bit disorganized, because folks were just not really getting on the same page in terms of a coherent platform of demands. And it wasn’t clear where people should go if they wanted to plug into organizing if they were new, because there were a lot of people coming up at this time, who were just new to this and wanted to get involved. And also a lot of money, a lot of people were donating money at this time, and like, not knowing where to direct that. So a lot of money went towards certain groups that weren’t necessarily like doing work in the way that it should have been happening I guess I’ll say, and for various reasons. But a lot of people were just coming in new and didn’t really know where to go or what to do. I think that created a lot of stress and tension at the time. And then there was a coalition of organizations, which DARE was a part of, PrYSM was also a part of it and there were also community organizers like Vatic Kuumba, Che Rivera, who’s also an artist, and Vatic is also somebody who testified at the City Council meeting. So it was a group of different folks and organizations who had been doing this work for a couple decades. They formed a coalition, and DARE was part of that too.
They started to host regular meetings to analyze the budget, to go through the budget very carefully and look at where it could be cut and to put together a very clear, well researched set of demands. I wasn’t part of those meetings so that’s where I think you need to talk to PrYSM about that because I don’t know where they’re at with that right now. I’m not really sure how that played out. I know that they were trying to also organize community conversation, so that was one of the asks that PrYSM put out at the City Council meetings. PrYSM’s Deputy Director Vanessa spoke at that meeting and the demand that she made very clearly was to also just give people more time to talk about this, time to think about what defunding the police looks like and to not be rushing through. So, that was one of the things that folks were working on. They were working on putting together these community forums and community conversations to just have open conversation with people about defunding the police, and about what does that even mean. DARE actually did one of those too. We did a teach-in with Behind The Wall’s members and staff who helped facilitate the teach-in. I think we had maybe 100-150 people in attendance. We did it hybrid, so it was on Zoom and in person, because for a lot of our members, Zoom was still a super new technology for them at the time. We also had a lot of older folks who came to DARE and were sitting in the parking lot. And we also had a bunch of mostly younger folks on Zoom. Basically we did a brief history of policing –Marco McWilliams did that presentation– and then we split up into breakout groups and asked people to think about a particular situation. So we gave everybody a different scenario of harm happening and asked them how would you address this harm if you didn’t have police, and if you did have the money for whatever resource you wanted. It was interesting for people to think about that and people came up with a lot of different suggestions and ideas.
Shereece Rankine 00:16:24
I just want to ask a clarifying question, though. This training program that you’re referring to, (did) this come about because of the George Floyd murder? Or was this just about defunding the police in general?
Anusha Alles 00:16:43
It wasn’t a training program. DARE did a one time teach-in with our members and we opened it up to the public, but also, this coalition of folks who were working on defund the police, they had already been talking about that and thinking about that, but they started to put together these community conversations, because there was so much happening around defunding the police. So basically, we had a lot of people jumping into it: a lot of folks who weren’t necessarily impacted; a lot of folks who were impacted but were also new to organizing. It was a lot of energy all of a sudden, at once, around a topic that a lot of people didn’t really have all the information about yet. And on top of that, having all these conversations around the city budget, and everybody’s feeling this urgency to make something happen quickly and PrYSM and other folks were basically saying it can’t happen that quickly, we need to slow down, and we need time to talk to our community members and to get folks aligned. It’s been interesting. This is something we’ve continued to talk about with our members. In Behind The Walls we talk about this a lot, because not everybody in our membership, not everybody in our committee–even folks who have spent years in prison– not everybody agrees that prisons and police should be abolished. And this is coming from communities who have experienced so much trauma at the hands of police and prisons. And there’s like a number of reasons why people feel that way. It’s very true that it takes time. It takes time to have those conversations and to do this in a way that actually is led by the people who are most impacted, and honors their experiences. So, it’s an ongoing conversation in our organization, for sure.
Shereece Rankine 00:19:10
You mentioned there still exists a coalition of organizations, and that DARE collaborated with them during the protests. You mentioned PrYSM, are there other organizations that you can point to that DARE collaborated with? Or was there any sort of coordination with DARE and other organizations during the protests?
Anusha Alles 00:19:30
If you can get a hold of Kia Bryant, she was our Executive Director at the time, she was the person who was doing that work, the coalition work. She was doing a lot of that coalition work with PrYSM, and she was attending those meetings, and I can’t remember all the other organizations that were involved. I believe Sista Fire was part of it and ARISE also and like I said, a couple community organizers who weren’t affiliated with a particular organization, but had been thinking about that work for a while. And like I said, the work that DARE and Behind The Walls did around defunding the police was tied into all the work we had already been doing around the prison and the COVID outbreak. So the folks that we were working with were mostly people who did work around incarceration. So we were coordinating with Black and Pink Providence. They also had a person speak at that City Council meeting on behalf of their organization. I think they might have had two people who spoke. We were also working with The Formerly Incarcerated Union, the incarcerated workers organizing committee was involved in that as well, and a few advocacy orgs were also lending support – Center for Justice was one of them. I feel like I’m forgetting somebody, I still have the groups so let me think about this.
Shereece Rankine 00:21:33
Okay. While you do that, you spoke about some of the legislative actions that DARE advocated for after, well, I say after but after, during and even before George Floyd was murdered. I’m wondering if you could just tell me a little bit more about what those legislative actions were that your organization was advocating for?
Anusha Alles 00:22:06
Before George Floyd, and before COVID, we had been working on a bill called Fair Chance Licensing, which was a campaign we had been working on for a couple of years with Behind The Walls, and it was part of a national push for licensing reform. The point of it was just to open up job opportunities for people with records. It was focused on occupational licensing issued by the state. So we had been working on that with a coalition of a lot of other people and when COVID hit it really sort of threw off everything, because we didn’t know what was going to happen with the legislative session. We couldn’t get into the building. We couldn’t really talk to anybody. So it was kind of on pause but when George Floyd was murdered, and these protests started to happen, I think there were all these calls for actually coming out. Everybody was putting out their statement of where they stand with Black Lives Matter. And I think the State House basically felt like they needed to do something similar to put out some statement or show of solidarity. We had been at the State House laying the groundwork for our bill for a couple of years already. And it wasn’t a huge ask. It was a pretty common sense reform. We were basically saying, if you’re going to deny somebody a job based on their record, you need to explain how their record is actually relevant for the job that they’re trying to get a license for. So if somebody has a drug offense, you can’t just automatically throw out their application. You need to say, Oh, this is how it’s going to impact their ability to be a barber, for example. So it wasn’t a super radical reform. They were acting like it was before, they were like, I think mostly it was going to cost them more administrative work, because they were going to have to actually be accountable around their behavior and their decisions, and they had to document everything and notify people and, basically, they had to do more work because they had to be accountable and transparent. But it wasn’t a really radical shift that we were asking for. We’re asking for basic accountability, and basic transparency. And so they passed it. They had been trying to push back on it. They were kind of jerking us around. They had asked us to exclude anybody who was convicted of a crime of violence, which was an outrageous ask, because most felonies are considered crimes of violence in Rhode Island, including drug charges. And, they were just giving us a really hard time. But when this uprising was happening, I think as a way to say, Okay, well, we’re standing with Black Lives Matter, they passed that bill.There were all these bills in session, and they picked like a handful of bills to pass and they picked that bill also.
Shereece Rankine 00:25:26
Interesting. So in addition to the Fair Chance Licensing bill that was passed, are there any other legislative actions that DARE advocated for? You spoke about defunding the police, and given that protests were happening when George Floyd was murdered, are there any legislative action that came about that DARE wanted to advocate for?
Anusha Alles 00:26:10
There was a lot more conversation around the Police Officers Bill of Rights. I don’t know if people have talked to you about this already. It’s like this fucked up piece of legislation that we have in Rhode Island that basically gives police officers immunity; and you should check this because I want to make sure I’m not saying it wrong, but I believe I might have a handout here. So it basically makes it almost impossible to fire officers; to discipline and fire Officers. They can’t be fired or suspended for longer than two days until they go through a hearing and they are heard by a board that’s made up of police officers, so they basically can’t be held accountable in Rhode Island. And if criminal charges are brought against the officer, which is rare, the hearing is just put on pause until the charges are resolved. So basically, while they have an open case, the officer can’t be fired. Okay. So it’s really, terrible, and we’re one of the worst states in the country because of that bill, in terms of holding police accountable. So a lot of people started talking about that after George Floyd’s murder and also, because, just a few months after George Floyd was murdered, we had a really bad incident of police violence here too that made the news. Like I said, police violence is happening all the time in Rhode Island, but, this was very public, it was on camera, and it got picked up by the news. This boy, he was in his early 20s, Jhamal Gonsalves, his dad is actually a DARE member so it really hit close for us. At that point, there was a revival of these protests. There was a lot of protests happening at that time, too but around that, and George Floyd, a lot of people started talking more about LEOBOR because his father, who is a DARE member, was calling for accountability around this police officer and trying to get him disciplined, and there was very little that could be done because of this bill because it was a Rhode Island police officer. I think, if you can get in touch with Black Lives Matter PAC, they will be the ones to talk to you about the LEOBOR, because they did a lot of advocacy around that and they’ve a lot of the community organizing around that, trying to get people educated about the bill and prepared to push the State House around it. I think PrYSM also was looking at that, but I’m not really sure what exactly they were doing.
Shereece Rankine 00:29:36
Okay. Can you say if there is anyone that your team was working with from the Rhode Island State Legislature?
Anusha Alles 00:29:46
Well, we had our sponsors. We were working with our sponsors on the Fair Chance Licensing Bill. That was Scott Slater on the House side, and Senator Harold Metts on the Senate side.
I would also talk to Chris, our director, because a lot of what I’m telling you is Behind The Walls specific, so DARE also is part of like larger campaigns that are not based in a committee. The tenants and homeowners committee was also working on their own work at the time too, I think they were working on rent control at the time. So there are more things that we were involved in, but I can’t really speak to all of them because I wasn’t really leading that work.
Shereece Rankine 00:30:343
Okay. The work that you spoke to me about with regards to the Fair Chance Licensing Bill, that was work that was being done by Behind The Walls, and it’s a committee within DARE, not necessarily DARE the larger organization?
Anusha Alles 00:31:11
Yeah. I mean, it’s a DARE campaign, but it was being organized by that committee, that committee was doing the work.
Shereece Rankine 00:31:19
Got it. Okay. I just have three other questions that I need to get through. Is DARE or Behind The Walls involved in any partnership programs between the local community and law enforcement?
Anusha Alles 00:31:48
No, we don’t work with the police at all. No.
Shereece Rankine 00:31:53
Are there ways in which you think that the gap could be bridged between the community and law enforcement?
Anusha Alles 00:32:01
I can speak for myself personally, I would say no. At the end of the day, the police are the people who take away our community members. So no matter how friendly or polite a police officer is, their job is still to serve a system that’s breaking up our families and our communities.
Shereece Rankine 00:32:29
Okay, and do you think then that the protests have had any sort of influence, whether good or bad on the relationship between the community and law enforcement?
Anusha Alles 00:32:54
I would say it got worse, because of the way that the police responded to the protests. They were coming out, in full riot gear for these protests organized by black children. And they arrested a lot of protesters, when Jhamal Gonsalves was put in the coma there were protests, and they arrested a bunch of people at that time as well, I think, and assaulted some of those people. One of them was my friend. So I saw them the next day, they were covered in bruises, as well as some of the people that they had been arrested with. There have been many incidents of police violence since then. This past summer, DARE was supporting two families, two separate incidents within one week of each other, in which police just brutally assaulted children, Black and Brown children. The first incident, they pepper sprayed and beat about 20 children who were hanging out in their backyard, and they pepper sprayed a one year old baby. One of the kids passed out from being maced. And they took a teenage girl too – I think a couple of kids– and put them in the back of a police car in the middle of summer, a hot police car, when they had just been maced. They couldn’t breathe, and they refused to turn air conditioning on. A week later, they beat three teenage boys– 15 year old boys – So I would say if anything, they’re just more hostile and more aggressive. .
Shereece Rankine 00:34:49
The incidents that you just spoke about, the two separate incidents that occurred within a week of each other, was that this summer [2022]?
Anusha Alles 00:34:32
That was last summer [2021]. If you look on our Instagram, you can follow everything because we were regularly posting and updating about it and organizing protests and stuff around that.
Shereece Rankine 00:34:59
Okay.
Anusha Alles 00:35:02
There’s a lot of info on our Instagram. It’s a good document of everything we’ve been doing over the last couple of years.
Shereece Rankine 00:35:20
Anusha, are there any questions that I failed to ask that you think would be really important information to put out there in the open? Is there anything else that you think that I should know? Any last words that you want to add or any big takeaways that I should walk away with?
Anusha Alles 00:35:46
I would just say that we, and a lot of other people were already doing organizing that was relevant around this, and I guess before, and I would also say all the organizing that we do like the housing justice work as well, because probably because of the way that poverty is criminalized, the way that survival is criminalized, fighting for people to have safe, healthy lives is abolitionist work. So I would say that we’ve been doing that work. And while we tried to incorporate the energy of people in that moment, in some ways, I feel like we just kind of kept trucking along. And the bill that we’re working on now is a probation reform bill. So again, it’s focused on just reducing the number of people who are getting locked up, reducing the number of people who are incarcerated. So the current campaign is BAIL ON 32. And the Tenants and Homeowners Association is working on rent control because we’re trying to target the root causes of incarceration, and trying to fight for decriminalization of people’s survival. Those are all related to this defund the police work.
I can also give you some information about the bail reform bill that we’re working on now, too. This is the other thing that came out of all that. We didn’t do a lot of the advocacy around changing the laws, but we’ve been doing work to just connect people with resources and educate folks about their rights. But there were folks who have been working on this from the center for health and justice transformation, and we took up some of that work as well around court debt and how a court debt gets assigned in Rhode Island because that’s another bullshit reason why people get locked up. So you get fines and fees assigned to you and sometimes you’re forced to pay restitution as part of your sentencing as well. When you’re going through the court system, and in Rhode Island, if you miss a court date or fail to make a payment, they can pull out a warrant for you. And a lot of times they don’t even tell you that you have debt. So people come out after serving years of a prison sentence and they don’t know that they have 1000s in debt, and then they find out because they might be driving along and they get stopped by police. Maybe they’re being profiled or whatever it is, the police run their name, and it turns out that they have an arrest warrant. And then they get locked up again, they’re back in jail. So that’s another thing that we started looking at a lot around this time and have continued to work on, we’ve been providing support around that.
Shereece Rankine 00:38:52
And can you just tell me the name once more?
Anusha Alles 00:38:57
It’s criminal case court debt, basically. I can give you one of these slides too, if you want. Last year we started talking about it and in the fall we launched it. We also made a community court debt fund, so that’s another project that came out of all of this as well. We’re just trying to think about things that we could do to help prevent folks from being arrested for petty minor things, things that could be more immediately addressed.
Shereece Rankine 00:39:39
All right. I should, again, thank you so much for your time,
Anusha Alles 00:39:44
No problem.
Shereece Rankine 00:39:46
Alright Anusha take care.
Anusha Alles 00:39:48
Good luck with your project.