EDITORIAL: Is This Woman the Most Irresponsible Politician in Rhode Island?

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

EDITORIAL

The idea that one politician could be the most irresponsible — more irresponsible than all others — seems to be an impossible distinction.

Providence City Councilor Helen Anthony appears to have secured that distinction. 

She is a bastion of inconsistent, politically expedient, and dangerous political blithering.

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She is right up there with those passing false information on the vaccine or lying about election results. The difference might be that they are consistent in their false information, but Anthony is a faux truthteller with a message that she thinks her audience wants to hear and it changes with the audience.

Anthony — represents Ward 2 on Providence's East Side -- which has seen multiple shootings and a recent murder.

Two of the shootings took place right in front of a Providence park with a playground. The shootings took place at the Billy Taylor Park in the Mount Hope section of the East Side -- three men were wounded in those two shootings.

Anthony is a constant critic of the Providence Police budget and has repeatedly called for defunding the Department, at a time when the Department has its lowest staffing level in 50 years — lowest since the 1970s.

And her calls for defunding have taken place at a time when Providence is facing a wave of violent crime.

Other members of the City Council have the same position of “defunding,” but where Anthony has the distinction is that her positions are so remarkably inconsistent and her narrative and votes are so dishonest that the outcome is a hobgoblin of public policy chaos.

Let’s try to recap her positions and statement and if you get confused as to her actual stance, well, then you are following along perfectly because her positions are a head-on collision of inconsistency and manipulation of facts.

 

Here are some of Anthony’s words:

In an interview with UpriseRI published on July 10, 2020, Anthony is quoted as saying, “‘I am very supportive of reallocation of some of the police funds.’ Anthony said she does not want police responding to social problems. She wants to create ‘some other model that can address those issues. I don’t want it based in public safety or the police department, I think it should be a community-driven response team.’”

In her August 2020 newsletter, she wrote the police staffing could be cut even further. “If non-criminal matters can be handled by other professionals, theoretically we could reduce the number of police officers. If a similar program could be created in Providence, I believe funds could be reallocated from the police budget to support it,” wrote Anthony.

In July of 2021, Anthony announced she was opposing the City of Providence fiscal year 2022 budget over a $48,500 expenditure targeted to recruit the next academy class.

"I will not be voting for this budget — when it was amended at the last finance meeting it was amended to add an additional $48,500 for the recruitment of the next police academy," said Anthony.

"I think that amending the budget to include the additional amount this year, while the amount isn’t really what is the issue, in my mind, it’s more a message that we have not delivered on our word that we would create police reform, some accountability. We’ve been listening to, and it’s been a nationwide discussion, it’s been a city discussion on how we need to reform our police and rather than do anything through the budget, which is what I hoped would be done, we actually added an additional amount, which I think really just says to the people who have been asking for this reform, it says we’re not interested, and that we’re just going to continue doing business as usual. So I cannot support this budget," she added.

She did say at that Council meeting that, " I will say that I have supported the police contract, I supported the police academy that’s in the budget this year." But not the dollars to recruit good candidates. And, these comments were just months after she wanted to defund the police when the staffing dropped to 437. Under then Mayor David Cicilline the staff was just under 500 and now it is 403.

Does Anthony believe that there would be better policing by having fewer and fewer officers? More officers trying to respond to more calls during an upswing in crime. Does she think the families of the 15 who have been murdered to date want to see less and less protection? And by the way, 14 of the 15 murdered this year were men and women of color. 

Anthony is irresponsible and the impact is very dangerous for those who live, work and visit Providence.

UPDATED: 10:31 AM 8/10/21

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