Black police officers in Providence dismayed by surge of hostility

Providence Police Patrolwoman Deanna Johnson typically works 3 to 11 p.m., so her shift was just about over when, late on the night of June 1, all hell broke loose.

Looters smashed their way into the Providence Place mall. Someone jumped on the hood of a police cruiser; others burned it down to its rims. Amid the melee, some officers were injured, as was a man who was shot in the eye with a “less-lethal” projectile by a different officer. Rioters broke into shops downtown, set a fire in a shoe store while a family slept upstairs, and destroyed cars at the Department of Children, Youth and Families.

Johnson, 36, was in a state of disbelief and despair. Driving home after 10 hours of mayhem, trying to compose herself before she saw her two daughters, she wept.

“It was really really hurtful to stand there and have things pelted at you — pipes, bottles, whatever, and to watch our police car burn,” she said in an interview. “I couldn’t believe it.”

It felt, to Johnson, like pure, undistilled hatred, for a department she believes has made enormous strides. Was it all gone, in one very difficult night, the start of a very difficult summer?

“This is not what I signed up for,” Johnson said. “I represent what this community needs.”

As a young girl in the Manton projects, Johnson would help a community officer hand out hot dogs and hamburgers. Following in the footsteps of the officer who became a father figure to her, she became a cop three years ago, part of a wave of new police officers who look different from the department’s past — she’s a Black woman, with deep roots in the city.

Nobody on the police force agreed with the “horrendous” police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Johnson said. But Minneapolis is not Providence. Providence, she said, has made progress. That’s what she represents.

As she spoke to a Journal reporter recently, Johnson was off-duty. A week and a half later, a barely recognizable Johnson was back to work. Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, had shot and badly wounded Jacob Blake, a Black man. It sparked protests in, among other places, Providence, outside police headquarters.

Johnson was there in riot gear — black gloves, black helmet, black leg and arm protection, black mask with a blue stripe, side by side with other officers.

On the other side was a roughly equal row of protesters who said that the police, unremittingly violent and implacably racist, should be abolished altogether.

“It’s difficult to hear someone telling me you’re on the wrong side,” Johnson had said a week and a half earlier. “No, I’m not on the wrong side. This is the side that I’m going to be on.”

Providence Police Patrolwoman Jan-Delle Johnson was off June 1. So she woke up the next day to frantic text messages: Are you all right? She’d slept through the whole thing. She was fine. But the city was not.

Before the summer of 2020, Jan-Delle recalls Black and Hispanic mothers asking her to take a picture with their kids. Jan-Delle felt like a role model for the idea that you could become a cop no matter where you came from — in her case, the South Side of Providence.

“I’m Black, and this uniform is blue, but still, you just treat everyone with the same level of respect as you want in return,” said Jan-Delle Johnson, 29, no relation to Deanna.

A summer of protests, and deeper levels of distrust of and hostility toward the police, have made that equation more difficult, Jan-Delle said. She is often working protests because she’s often assigned to work downtown. People will yell “Black Lives Matter” at her.

“I’m like,” she said, looking down at her arm, “’I know. I 100% agree.’”

There have been some particular problems at a downtown bar that serves as a hub of police criticism. On July 22, a call came in for a noise complaint at Fortnight.

“This is going to be a bad call,” Jan-Delle thought.

Amid the mutual allegations of hostility between the police and the bar, one of the workers at Fortnight had a question for the officers: What did they think of the Black and brown community?

“I am Black,” Jan-Delle told her. “Personally, every time I drive by, I have people yelling, [expletive] me, [expletive] the police.”

A few weeks later, Jan-Delle was working an anti-police protest outside Gov. Gina Raimondo’s East Side house. A protester, a young Black woman, pulled her aside. The woman called her a traitor, said she was on the wrong side of the fence.

This was about as far as it gets from asking to take a picture together, being held up as a role model.

“George Floyd’s murder pushed us back 15 years in policing,” Johnson said. “We’re finally at a good spot with policing, with the community. We’re having a lot of engagement with our community. This is a good way to go. Then that happened — all hell broke loose.”