Steve Ahlquist is the founder of UPRISE RI, one of Rhode Island’s local, independent news outlets. Ahlquist was also a writer, editor and reporter for the outlet from June 2017 until his departure from the outlet in August 2023. Ahlquist provided much of the reporting and coverage of the BLM protests in Rhode Island. Ahlquist is currently a reporter with Substack.
Steve Ahlquist was interviewed by Sophia Ellis in 2022. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
[off-camera]
Sophia Ellis: Would you mind starting with your name? Your preferred pronouns? Your job position?
Steve Ahlquist: Sure. My name is Steve Ahlquist. [my pronouns are] He him. My job position at UPRISE is I’m the founder, editor and reporter.
Sophia: So you’re the editor and creator. When did you start?
Steve Ahlquist: About four years ago, maybe five years ago. Now, before that, I used to work for an organization called Rhode Island Future, which was an independent, progressive news blog. Similar to what I’m doing now. That had started as a commentary on current events from a progressive point of view, but I wanted to do more reporting. So I started doing some labor reporting, some environmental reporting there, and some social justice reporting in general. And after the founder of that organization and I parted ways I went on to work for found appraiser in Ireland, so I could continue doing what I was doing.
00:00:00
Steve Ahlquist
The idea was to give voice to people who don’t have a typical voice. An example [that] I commonly give is when the governor calls a press conference, all the news crews show up and they all record it, they all broadcast it, they all make a big deal about it. But if a smaller independent neighborhood group or a social justice group, such as PrRYSM, or DARE, or the PSU – Providence Student Union, if they call a press conference, sometimes no one shows up. Sometimes I’m the only person in the room. Oftentimes, I’m the only person in the room. They don’t have the ability to get their messages out as much. And so my thought was to amplify those voices, which is why we use a little megaphone when we talk about our Uprise. If you look around, you’ll see that megaphone show up occasionally. And I felt bad because I realized PSU uses a megaphone too, so I didn’t really want to jump on it too much. But the idea is to amplify voices that are not typically heard.
00:01:05
Sophia Ellis
And when you started the organization, Were there particular organizations and groups that you collaborated with and worked with the most?
00:01:15
Steve Ahlquist
Yeah, I mentioned three of them, PSU, PrYSM, DARE, and more recently AMOR, The Fang Collective, which is a group that came up around the same time I did. They do mostly environmental work, but they also do immigration work. There are dozens – actually ARISE is a great little group. It’s hard because I’m one person and there is only one real reporter here, and so I have an incredible number of stories to cover, right? So there are groups that are dedicated to health care, there are groups that are dedicated to education, there are groups that are dedicated to social justice in general like Black Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter Rhode Island PAC. And the Providence DSA, the Working Families Party. The Political Cooperative is around. And the idea is that it ranges from politics which goes right up to the statehouse where it’s like really, really big in a way, and then there is finer politics on the ground which are smaller and more difficult to know. Also, I cover the General Assembly. I cover the Providence City Council. I cover other city council meetings as I can, but we have 39 cities and towns in Rhode Island as small as we are, and no one person can possibly cover all of it. I could have a team of 10 and only scrape it. And with the diminishing resources of major news networks, it’s harder and harder to get in; to cover the stories that need to be covered. So I just add my voice as best I can, on the stories that I feel are important. At best I can do two stories a day. More normally, I do one story a day. And I work every day.
00:03:03
Sophia Ellis
Where does funding generally come from?
00:03:06
Steve Ahlquist
We’re totally user-supported, which means that if you like my work and [would] like to send me money, then you do and if you don’t, you don’t. We have some advertising, but no one’s ever paid us a lot for advertising.
00:03:18
Sophia Ellis
Do you have any other collaborating reporters that you utilize during the protest that you know? Can they reach out to you?
00:03:30
Steve Ahlquist
Well, in general, because of the small amount of money that we have, I don’t try to reach out to people. But I do take collaborations from people all the time. Will James was probably the most amazing in that way. And he came out right as the protests were starting in Rhode Island more or less, not right away but more or less the biggest ones he was there for. And then after that he was there for all of them through the summer protest and beyond. Before that, I’ve had different people I’ve worked with. I sometimes work with the College Hill Indy; I’ve worked with [them] and [have] reposted stories from there. I’ve reposted other stories of other places. I think, though, for the most part, I don’t like to not pay people. So, if people say, Hey, I’d love to work for you, I’d say well, I can’t actually hire people. And I don’t really necessarily want people to volunteer and do it for free. I did that for three years, and it’s hard. There’s a value to doing this work that needs to be respected and I feel it is important to respect that even if it kinda crimps my ability to do a little bit.
00:04:50
Sophia Ellis
I’m sure that with the coverage that you do on social justice, that there’s some pushback that you receive from either state or the public. How do you handle that? Or what is that pushback that you receive?
00:05:07
Steve Ahlquist
There’s a couple different forms of pushback. There’s like the death threats which come occasionally. So most recently, because of some stuff that happened on Sayles street with the police, arresting a family and arresting one of two children, pepper spraying children, arresting a woman of color, who was a lesbian and targeting her for arrest beforehand, you can hear the police clearly on the tape. It got really, really ugly and the family was suffering from a lot of death threats. Somebody tried to light their house on fire. There’s a lot of different things that happened there. And it’s uncomfortable to revisit some of that, but also, personally, there were some threats to me, which is uncomfortable, but not what a mother with small children is dealing with, right? It’s a little bit different. So I try not to make too big a deal out of it. How do I say this? It is difficult, because my last name Ahlquist is fairly uncommon in Rhode Island, and so therefore, my relatives, I feel might get some blowback on that. And that bothers me a little bit more than my personal safety, which should bother me more, but it does, but for the most part, I worry mostly about blowback hitting someone else. So that’s one level of it, and that’s the most extreme and it’s not common, but it’s there. And it’s always in the background when I’ve covered white supremacy in general, more specifically, white supremacy, not the general white supremacy in our government, but the more general, the more specific white supremacy organizations, that gets uncomfortable. I’ve been at some literal fascist, white power rallies on State House lawn where violence broke out; and people are fighting physically, like, as far away from you as I am. And there’s a little bit of a shell shock that comes from it. And so that gets a little more scary and a little more personal, because you don’t know where that’s gonna go. But then there’s other types of threats, which I’m sometimes too dumb to get. I was at an event, I don’t really want to give too many specifics on this. But I was at an event where someone was telling me that in the past, they would have dealt with people like me by keying your car, beating them up; and I laughed, because they said it in such a nice way. But I realized as I was driving home from the event that Oh, that was kind of a subtle threat. But the pushback I get from political people is that I’ll be suddenly removed from press releases, like the governor’s office used to do it, under the previous governor, Governor Raimondo. I would occasionally just find myself not getting press releases. It happened with the State Senate as well. All of a sudden one day, you’re getting press releases, and you can show up for events. And then one day you realize, hey, wait, is this event happening? How come I didn’t get this press release? I missed it. It was because I was taken off the press list; they say, “Oh, it must have been an accident. I don’t know how your name got taken off it”. But it’s obvious they are doing it to mess with me, and that’s difficult. The first couple of times that it happened, I let it go. But after that, whenever I was taken off a press list, I would just go on Twitter and say why was I taken off? I would make a big deal out of it and directly confront them. And that’s mostly stopped. The last couple of years I haven’t really had to deal with that too much. And then the other thing is lack of access. When you have to go up to the governor and find him, you send a request to the governor for a statement, and then you get nothing. So you have to go to a press conference, unrelated to the subject, and then grab the governor, and be one of those reporters who sticks a camera in your face and says, “hey, can you answer this question?” and try to put them on the spot. So those are the kinds of things that happen. You do get pushback. You get pushback because if you take a stance on something like an environmental issue, unions might be upset with you, right? And so because they want to build something, and you’re saying, hey, that would be bad; Burrillville was like this. And so as a result, my relationship with unions, at least some unions, is really strained. And yet I’m very much a supporter of unions and other unions like SEIU, Unite Here, appreciate my work. And for instance, if the building trades have an issue, and they need help, I’m there but for the most part; that’s the kind of pushback I get. So there’s a range right? Political access, actual death threats. I’m not sure what else you need from there. And there is the idea that when you do reporting, more specifically on the Black Lives Matter protests from two years ago, the police notice you. So Will James, who you’ll hopefully talk to, was pepper sprayed one night and I’ve been this close to pepper spray. I’ve seen it pass me. I’ve never been hit directly with pepper spray, but I’ve smelled it.
00:10:26
Sophia Ellis
Have you had any altercations with the police?
00:10:28
Steve Ahlquist
Well, no, I’ve never been arrested. Although I’ve come close, I believe. I’ve never been directly. The most that has happened, and this is long before the current protests, but there was a time like eight or seven years ago during a similar type of protest. A group of people went onto the highway, and they blocked the highway 95.They were at the police station, they jumped the fence, they went down, blocked the highway, and I was filming from the side. I wasn’t even on [the] Highway I was filming. Partly because I didn’t have confidence that I could jump. I knew I could jump over the fence one way, but I wasn’t sure I could quite get back. So I didn’t really, not with all my equipment, because at that time I carried a tripod and cameras. Now it’s a little bit of a lighter operation. But that time it was a little harder, so I stayed over on one side and I was filming when a cop came by and told me to move off the sidewalk. Now this is totally ridiculous because I’m obviously filming. There’s no reason to move me from the sidewalk. I’m not doing anything illegal at all. But he bumped me. He was a big, fat cop and he just started bumping me with his belly to make me move, so I did. But that’s probably the only time a cop has actually directly assaulted me in any sense, used his body on me, and it was rather crude. At the Wyatt, I was approached by a prison guard who claimed to be a federal agent and was poking me and making me walk backwards. I have that on video. Most of the time, if you want to avoid being arrested or avoid altercations with cops, if a cop says to do something, just do it. Right? Oftentimes, they say “back off” or “don’t step over this line”; don’t step over the line back off, right?
I’ve done things that could put me in the position of being arrested. If you show up at a protest, you’re close to being arrested all the time. I’ve seen people arrested who are just watching the protests, not participating, just watching. I’ve seen them arrested. I know that it can be indiscriminate at times. But for the most part, I think the police understand I have to do the job, or the job needs to be done, but I don’t know if they all understand that. But for the most part, I like to think that the cops won’t bust me up and they appreciate the job I have to do. And I’ll say this, I’ve reported on bad behaviors of police. And if a police officer is behaving badly, I would think all police officers would want to know that and want that out, and want that stopped. I mean, if you’re a police officer, and you have any thoughts that the job you’re doing is worthwhile or decent or necessary or good, then you’d want bad cops to be not doing that, right?
00:13:29
Sophia Ellis
I would I would like for you to describe the protest of summer 2020–your own perspective, your own experiences, what you remember?
00:13:38
Steve Ahlquist
Yeah, sure. I have looked quickly at the headlines of them. I call them up and I just scan through but I’d rather go into specifics and analyze it, beat by beat. I’d rather just give my overall impression of that summer, which was very, very busy and seemingly endless. And it lasted well into the fall and into the winter. It was when it got really cold people stopped, but even out in some really cold weather too, late at night. So the protests in Providence or reaction to things like Breonna Taylor. We’ve always had little protests based on shootings– police–. People show up – a 100 people, 50 people, on the statehouse back steps, or maybe a short march. We’ve always had these little protests. But when it got really, really big, was when we had 10,000 people, which is maybe the largest protest in our town’s history, and hard to know, but it’s definitely the largest protest by far I’ve ever seen. I covered that protest from the beginning to the end. When I started marching, I kind of ran ahead, I got to the front of the crowd, ran ahead, where I ran up the steps to the statehouse. And as you look out, you see literally the streets are full and endless, and it packs the State House lawn to the point where you can’t see no green. I mean, it was as far to the right and left and far back, taking up the street. As far back as you can see, it was massive and 10,000 was an estimate; I don’t even know, it could have been much more. It wasn’t less, it could have been much more. And that’s when it felt very serious when the governor stepped out.
And, you know, I tried to speak to people, and we have to remember this was the early days of COVID[19]. No one knew at that point how COVID exactly spread. We didn’t know that we were safer outside if we were masked, right? No one knew. Coming together at that time, it was not known how dangerous that was for the spread or transmission of COVID. We were all going to be out there, we’re all going to be together. The weather was nice, transmission was low but that wasn’t learned until much, much later and there was no super accurate test for it, I just had to wait and see. I’m in the middle of thousands of people crowded around me– students and people. I’m holding the camera as best I can. I’m trying to record speakers. I’m trying to take pictures. They’re doing live streaming for the first time at a big event. It was chaotic but everybody was there because there was an idea that Black lives were being killed by police. And sure there was a risk of COVID infection and transmission, but we all had to make a decision to be there. And for that many people to make that decision, and I know some people were really nervous. I don’t know of anybody who caught COVID during those events or any of those outside events. But that [protest] was massive. And then after that they continued on. We had various groups in Rhode Island, various people came out of nowhere to start talking up these protests and talking about them. There’s a couple of different organizations that she was affiliated with and the names kept changing a little bit but she organized many of the later night protests.
Harrison Tuttle, anybody from the Black Lives Matter movement would be worth talking to about that. Don’t forget, it’s not a monolith right? There’s many, many points of view within there. That’s one of the reasons that defund the police was such a difficult subject for so many people, because not everybody in the community wants to defund the police. Not everybody has the same idea of what defund the police even means. We can talk about abolishing the police – what that looks like, what that’s about, but getting from here to there is a program of ideas and alternatives that need to be developed. And so defunding, is that just a matter of cutting funds? Or is that a matter of abolishing? What that looks like is really difficult to understand. And when you talk to people in the community, go door to door, just people in the street and say are you in favor of abolishing the police, they’ll say not really. What they want is a police force that works for them the same way it works for a white dude who lives on the east side like me, right? So if I call the police, they come in, they take my issue seriously. If you’re a black family [who] calls the police, they come and they might just pepper spray your three year old daughter and arrest your 21 year old daughter, you don’t know. And so I’ve never had that fear, right? I don’t live in that. I have this gigantic amount of white male privilege that I carry with me, and it’s not the same for me as other people. So it’s really important that people understand the differences there. So the groups that are calling for these actions [defund the police] are wide and varied. It includes [groups] like the NAACP, that you might think of as an older organization, slightly more conservative than BLM RI, but they get along. I’ve never seen them having sharp words with each other in public. They might have stern discussions, but that’s part of being in the revolutionary moment, right? It’s like having these difficult discussions with each other and calling and deciding what is it we’re really looking to do, what is it we’re trying to do. And I feel that my job is to amplify the voices when they speak, but not to draw judgments on them.
My other thing is, I try really hard not to comment on tactics, but I do want to defend civil rights. So the idea of blocking highways, which happened during these things — we had the highway blocked, way, way back. I’m sorry, I don’t know the exact date, but I have video and articles on this 60 years ago. So the highway was blocked, and after that happened we had members of the General Assembly who had felonize that. It was a misdemeanor, a fine. The idea of walking on the highway is illegal so you can get arrested or fined or ticketed. And they said, well, if you block the highway from now on, we want to make sure that it’s like a three year imprisonment. I was very vocal in that and I ended up being on radio and TV, and I wrote op-eds saying this [is] ridiculous. We have laws that deal with blocking highways, why would you want to felonize it? All you’re doing is say, when black people block a highway, we want to make sure it’s a felony. And we felonize [the] behavior of Black people all the time in all different ways, and it’s just a tactic. It’s not a violent tactic but it’s a tactic of getting attention. And so anyway, they never did felonize it but when it happened again, in Providence, they marched on to the highway. This time I followed them up onto the ramp onto the highway. Police came and they dispersed the crowd by using pepper spray. They stepped out and started spraying people willy nilly, forcing them over fences. I was on Highway at the time. Aside from me and Will, no other reporters went on the highway that day. They all decided to stop because “well, we can’t do that. My news station would be mad if I got arrested.” Everybody stopped at the onramp and said “we’re not going to follow them”. So we went up with them, and we followed them because, again, if there’s 300 people on the highway, and you’re one of them, you’re adding to the problem substantially, and I also wanted to be there. So I was able to record the police using pepper spray and stepping out, however people want to look at that. But then there was another round of people wanting to criminalize it, and again I asked rhetorically, just recently, on Twitter, I just put out now that we have these highway protests happening in Canada, are we going to be quick to criminalize? Are there going to be more renewed calls now that white people are doing it? Are there going to be renewed calls for felonizing walking on highways or highway protests? And, I think the silence on that shows there won’t be any. I also found an instance from the mid 80s where white people went to the highway into protest and there was never any call for that. So I just want to bring up those differences, because I think they’re important.
00:22:28
Sophia Ellis
I was also interested in when you were speaking, about you talking to the people during the highway protest, the big gatherings on the state lawn. Were you talking to folks? What were they saying? What were their concerns?
00:22:42
Steve Ahlquist
The biggest concern has always been mistreatment at the hands of police officers. And this is, I think, is shown in statistics on all sorts of levels where Black drivers are pulled over more often. Black drivers are arrested at higher rates when they have interactions with the police. The statistics show that we have a policing of Black people that is different than we do with White people in this country. And I think when we look at Black people being killed, or jailed, or otherwise being put into the criminal justice system — we see it today with SROs – School Resource Officers. We see it today with the school to prison pipeline. SROs are definitely a part of that. We see it in school outcomes. We saw it when we looked at redistricting, which is this big 10 year or once every 10 year process to redraw the district lines for the various Senator, Senate and Rep seats. We talked about prison redistribution, right? Taking people who are in prison in Cranston and putting them back in their home districts for purposes of counting who’s where. Because what we found was we’re taking people out of communities like in South Providence, we’re putting them in Cranston where we’re counting them for the purposes of population in Cranston, but they are not allowed to vote. Right? So they’re not voting. So what happens is, that district is a little smaller, Cranston gets a little bigger. They have a little bit more power. Black communities and communities of color have less power. The compromise that was worked out was ridiculous. Forty percent of prisoners would be restricted.
00:24:27
Sophia Ellis
Thinking about the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the uprisings within the entire country and the world, I’d like to bring it more locally, and think about what happened with Jhamal Gonsalves. Talk about the coverage with that, the responses to police brutality, what was your response?
00:24:46
Steve Ahlquist
I got to know the family pretty well, at least the father of Jhamal, during that time. It was very difficult. When the police do anything, and I ask for the footage, I’m usually told you’ll have to wait until a full investigation is done. And what happens with that is, by forcing you to wait until a full investigation is done, it means that time will pass, the investigation could take months, it could take a year, and by the time you get to the actual video, the circumstances around the thing have kind of already died down, people are already in jail or the city has already settled; and then suddenly you get the video. So in the case of Jhamal Gonsalves, there was a video. And just to back up, Jhamal was a person on a motorbike who was part of a gigantic group of people on bikes and ATVs going into Providence being tracked by police, who was at some point, whether accidentally or on purpose, depending on whose version you believe, cut him off, sent him into a wall, but he was in control of the bike until the cop cars pursuing him hit a stop sign that brought the stop sign down on his head, cracked his skull, broke his helmet, sent him into the wall. And then the aftermath of that was the police went over and were trying to move him. They were jerking on his legs. They were talking about hitting him with an epi pen because they thought he was ODing. I mean, it was very obvious he had crashed into a wall, but in the immediate aftermath of the [incident], [the] police were completely unconcerned and mostly were dealing with yelling at two people who were standing there trying to film it, screaming at them to get off and go away. I mean, literally more interested in controlling just average people on the sidewalk than dealing with a person who was dying in front of them. And so the response to that protest was [that] the Attorney General’s office took control. And eventually, after a month, maybe two months of investigation, released all the video in this big report and found that the officers behaved completely appropriately and there were no charges brought against the officers. I mean, The officers who were talking about hitting him with an epipen – it’s not an epipen, but you know what I’m talking about, for an OD [Narcan]– they didn’t bring any charges against them. They may have gotten like a day here, a day there docked, but there was nothing big on any of the police officers.
So the protests on that [Jhamal Gonsalves incident] were against things like the way the police behaved, the way the police circle their wagons, the way the police treat onlookers, the way things happened. So in a protest that came after that, here was even more violence. We had a cousin of Jhamal who was beaten by police and arrested. That’s when the real violence came out in a really big way. Now, it wasn’t just a matter of marchers saying “hey, the police need to be under control”, now it’s the police basically regaining control by beating people in streets, and harassing people. I saw it personally. It was during one of those protests at the very edge of Cranston, that Will James was hit with pepper spray, but I don’t think that he was a target. The target was a woman who was holding a camera who works for the PSL, which is the Party for Socialism and Liberation. She was in there and she got soaked, she was drenched. Will was just to the side of her and got a little hit. I remember going over trying to find water for him and it was difficult. And then the other thing that was because of the way the march happened, we had marched a long way to get to the border of Cranston, where Cranston police had set up a bunch of cars to prevent people from walking from Providence to Cranston. The Cranston police policy at the time was to just not let[ing] people from Providence into Cranston at all. So they were just basically blocking the street and saying you don’t get to enter here, whoever you are. So zero tolerance for protests and zero tolerance when people from Providence going there [to Cranston]. And then when the police moved to break it up – this was the state police, Cranston police and a few Providence cops– Cranston police entered Providence with State Police, pepper spraying everybody. I saw a Cranston police officer, and in fact I have it on video running forward spraying pepper spray, running into his own pepper spray cloud, and then stopping and walking back because he pepper sprayed himself. I saw a police dog highly agitated because they had been brought into a cloud of pepper spray and was hurt. And I saw a Providence Journal reporter threatened by two cops who had their night sticks out and told him if he didn’t move they’re gonna get him, and so he was running. And that’s probably the only reporter that didn’t write about that. I ended up writing about doing that, but he did not write about it which was amazing to me that a cop would threaten you while you’re covering the story and you would not write about it. I’m not sure why, I think it’s a [Providence] Journal thing but whatever.
00:30:34
Sophia Ellis
Was it because it’s a conservative news outlet?
00:30:40
Steven Ahlquist
All of the news outlets in Rhode Island are conservative. Providence Journal is owned by a Texas newspaper conglomerate. Channel 10 is owned by Sinclair media. Channel 12, as much as they pretend they’re not, it’s Fox News, I mean, it’s a local affiliate, it is controlled locally, and they do some really great work, but it’s Fox News Channel 12. Channel 6 does some good independent work, but they’re vastly underfunded. And GoLocalProv is relatively conservative. NPR is what it is. I’ll leave that to people. I believe it’s more conservative than they let on, but that’s me. I tend to be on the left so I understand if they want to say no, we’re more neutral, but I see them as being extremely conservative. And the Boston Globe, also they’re very conservative in the state. Those are the major news outlets, I think.
Just on Jhamal Gonzalez, just to wrap up a little bit because I see the question is like, how did the discourse change? The discourse changed because we now started to- look Jhamal isn’t the only incident in Rhode Island, right? During some of the other protests, there was an overnight protest which I missed, because it happened out of nowhere, and it wasn’t called by groups that I knew. That’s when a Providence Police car was on fire. There was a man who was driving to work that night, who rolled down his window and got hit in the eye with a beanbag and lost his eye and is suing the state as a result of this. There was another case, and again the names escape me and I apologize, where a man was assaulted by police officers who was on his back. Sergeant Hanley is the name of the officer who did it and he was later convicted of assaulting this person, right? These things happen in Rhode Island. I think what changed is that we were able to talk about those now, and people felt safer coming out, and that changed. That also seems to have changed because after Sayles street, we started to see the white supremacist push back against those peoples speaking out. Sayles Street was a party. A Black family had an altercation with a Hispanic Latino family. I’m not sure what the exact racial makeup there was, but they were having an altercation of some sort. The kids were getting into it; [the] police showed up. Eventually, the police lost their patience, they took out their pepper spray, they pepper sprayed the family, right down to a three year old girl, [the police] made several arrests, all of which I believe have been thrown out now. And then when the mother made complaints and talked about this publicly, for her troubles the family was threatened and it came from both, I think, the police themselves and from white supremacist organizations and white supremacist and just general online harassment. That was done to put the fear back into people. There was a general growing sense that we could talk about these issues. And so how do you get that [fear back into people]? You did that by instituting terror and fear and terrorism. And I think that was the pushback that we got most recently, and that’s how those cases go.
I don’t know where we are exactly now. Right? Because COVID has lingered, because the world has changed, because Trump is no longer president, but could be again. I don’t really know where we are. Because I feel like people thought once Trump is gone then things would get better. But if you’re going to be talking to AMOR later, just know that immigration was a whole nother set of issues that we’ve dealt with; the violence that we saw at Wyatt from prison guards. The protection that was afforded those prison guards was as good or better than any protection we afforded police officers who do similar violent actions; and this was a violent action. It wasn’t just a truck pulling into a bunch of protesters, it was prison guards themselves, leaving the prisons stepping outside and assaulting people with pepper spray and physically just beating them outside the Wyatt, and not one of those prison guards was charged with a crime, even though people were hospitalized, people had their bones broken. So it was awful. That was one of the more awful nights. Nobody was arrested, as far as I know, for the white supremacist violence that was brought, where we had people literally flown in from, Seattle, Washington, or Oregon, [who] came here to the East Coast, to be on the State House lawn– proud boys – to start a fight – which they did; violence ensued. Not one of those guys was arrested. One person was arrested. It was a young man of color who assaulted one of the people from Boston as he was leaving, but nobody else was arrested or charged as far as I know.
So what are we seeing? I don’t know what that all adds up to yet, because I’m in the middle of it and so there’s one point when you say, “Hey, here’s all the data on the summer of 2020” because that lasted a long time and plays out in different ways, right? There’s no way to know what the relationship between the immigration issue and Black Lives Matter really is because the two issues are related, but they also overlap and there’s different institutions. If you’re arrested, you could end up in a prison, right alongside somebody who was arrested just for being in this country quote, unquote, illegally. Yeah, so I don’t know where I’m going with that, but it’s hard. So where are we right now? I don’t really know. I do know that after all those marches, all that violence, all the stuff that happened, both the state and the city of Providence and most municipalities in Rhode Island increased funding for police. It did not go down. They didn’t even slow it down. Police funding went up both in Providence and in the state. We spent, or we’re spending millions of dollars to put cameras on more cops in the state. Providence right now and Newport are the only two with a camera system, so we’re gonna fund the entire state, anybody who wants them; but again, if the policies in Providence are any indication, you’re not going to have access to any video that shows the police behaving badly, unless there’s a huge outcry, unless there’s a huge reason for it.
I’ll go to another one, homelessness, declaring of homeless encampments in Rhode Island. I covered the homeless encampment in South Providence and I missed the clearing of a more recent one. I felt really bad. I wanted to visit them. They never reached out to me and I like to give people their privacy, especially when you’re homeless.You don’t want to blow up this person’s life by writing a story about a homeless encampment, that’ll just put them on the radar, right? So you have to be really careful how you do those things. But if a homeless encampment wants to fight back, and they need help, then I’m there to amplify their voice and help them. But I have video of the way they go when and just treat people in homeless encampments. I have reports from Woonsocket where police are going, taking the poles and tents and slashing camps in the middle of freezing cold days because homeless people are sleeping there. And I’ve got City Councillors from places like Woonsocket telling me that people go to Woonsocket on purpose because it’s so good to be homeless there. This is white supremacy, white terror. This is what it’s about, right? Protecting home values, whatever it looks like. Kennedy Plaza is related to this, the ongoing debate over whether or not we should clear the homeless out of Kennedy Plaza. So we didn’t want to move Kennedy Plaza out of Dorrance street, or at least the bus depot, so Kennedy Plaza can be a millionaires paradise for all the downtown owners there. So all of this is related in different ways. It’s all about race and power and money and greed; but the way it hits people is families destroyed, people in jail, people hospitalized, people beaten and people policed for just trying to live their lives. that’s not too expansive, but it’s hard for me to drill down to what it really is. An SRO in Mount Pleasant recently beat a student, arrested him. The video, this is awful, the video of the mom crying on camera on Facebook talking about it. Thirtysix or so groups, maybe more local groups, many of whom you’re talking to, others signed to things saying we want SROs out of schools because police are not making our students safer. I talked to the Commissioner of Public Schools and the Department of Education and the Governor yesterday, and they are both still in full support of SROs. It didn’t slow them down or impact them at all. This letter, this incident, nothing about it made them doubt that having police officers in schools to deal with routine regulation of students was a problem. They just said no, and that’s it. And when we talk about the school to prison pipeline, what’s more obvious than having literal prison guards who are cops in schools to shovel them right from school, to the police station, to the courts, to the prison system? Exactly what it’s about.
00:40:50
Sophia Ellis
After two years of protests, have you seen any changes that have happened within reporting?
00:41:07
Steve Ahlquist
Yeah. Over the years, I’ve done reporting, I’ve had things that I consider to be definite wins where my reporting has had a definite impact. I think of a power plant. They wanted to build [one in] Burrillville, and I think my reporting helped the people in Burrillville who didn’t want it there to defeat it. There were a bunch of different things that I’ve done and I feel have had good impacts. But as I tell people who write about this, they come to me and say, they have a story, you really need to do this story. I try to tell them that no one story is going to change the world really. If you think about Watergate, that was a series of articles, that wasn’t just one article that two guys wrote. It takes a long time before a story is developed and there is no one piece of journalism, that’s gonna end it all. I’ve had maybe one example of that in my life, maybe two where I’ve done one piece, and it was big enough to decide to say “oh that’s the end of that” and they were relatively minor issues. Doing something about racism, exploitation of workers, that takes thousands of stories and takes a worldwide effort. We’re not going to wipe out white supremacy and racism here in Rhode Island easily. They are always going to come back.There are people who want to do it through the electoral process by electing better people to the city council and the State House and that’s a possibility but that’s a long time; that’s decades of work. And for the most part, the Democratic Party in the state is happy with itself. The democratic voters in the state are [happy], despite all the complaints you might hear, they’re pretty happy with their representation. And people tend to have, how do I say it? right wing desires? You know, it’s hard to say what they want but the idea is that people want to be comfortable, they want to be safe, and they don’t necessarily realize that their comfort and safety might come at the cost of other people’s comfort and safety. Right? It does. They don’t see the direct line there. So do I have hope? I’m generally an optimistic person. I think optimism isn’t necessarily something you have, because it’s a logical way to get there. You could have optimism because it’s almost like a faith based one. So you’re optimistic because you think there might be hope. And maybe there is but I don’t know what that looks like. I see a future that is better, and I see the present, and I don’t know what the line is to get from here to there. Right? I don’t know what it means to go from here to a better world, so I don’t know what the process is. We’d have to break down what we do to get there. So I have hope, but it’s maybe optimism.
00:44:07
Sophia Ellis
Do you have any other thoughts that you’d like to add to finish up with this?
00:44:11
Steve Ahlquist
Only that as much as I have context, as much as I have ideas on all this stuff, I don’t want to be seen as an authority on protest, issues of blackness, issues of race. I’m not here to put my opinions out. I know I talk a lot, I’ve given a lot of my opinions, but I think all that can be taken not even with a grain of salt, it should probably just be dismissed. There are people out there who think about this and who do this work, and I really just want to highlight them. I don’t want to tell people how they should think about race, but I will present facts about race. I will present facts about life in the world, and how you interpret them is up to you; and what you do with that is up to you. So I don’t want to be seen as an authority on this. I’m a person who was a witness to it, who wrote about it as best I could. But if there’s going to be a definitive history of this, or even if a small history of it is written, I really hope they talk to people who are personally affected and personally invested in these issues for their own selves, their own family as well. It is important for me, obviously you can’t end racism without ending racism in white people, but it’s important to me that the affected people have the last best say in this. So I just want to make sure that we’re clear on that, though. I don’t want to put myself as the authority here, because I’m not.
00:45:41
Sophia Ellis
It’s impossible to be, like you said. Positionality plays a really huge role in what we’re doing here and what hasn’t been done, but it’s really important to get complete coverage of all of these aspects. And it’s important to hear your perspective, hear white folks stand up against this. It’s essential, and it’s something that I thank you for talking with us today.
00:46:14
Steve Ahlquist
Well, I’m happy to talk anytime.Thanks.