More than 100 protest police raid in Providence's West End

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL PHOTO / FRIEDA SQUIRES

From left, Elan Britto (holding flag), 13, Charlie Chhum, 17, Damery Ouch, 18, and Brian Capcap, 19, listen to a family member recount what happened when police raided a house at 222-224 Hanover Street on Tuesday, looking for weapons. The elderly woman in the foreground was in the house at the time.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- More than 100 people rallied outside a Buddhist temple in the city's West End Saturday to protest a Tuesday police raid at the nearby home of a Cambodian family.

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL PHOTO/ 
FRIEDA SQUIRES

Jeanie Dy-Harris, a relative 
of the people who were 
living at 222-224 Hanover Street,
speaks at the press conference.

Protestors denounced the raid as police brutality and demanded an apology from the city, the dropping of all charges filed as a result of the raid and an end to policing in the West End. They said police dragged a 13-year-old from his bed while he was sleeping and stomped on him, held a 77-year-old woman at gunpoint and mocked a woman who was using the bathroom when police burst in on her.

In a statement before the rally, Police Chief Hugh Clements said that officers had a court warrant to conduct the raid, that officers seized drugs from the house and that no one had filed a complaint about misconduct during the raid with the department's internal affairs bureau. Clements said the raid resulted from others in the neighborhood complaining that drugs were being sold from the house at 224 Hanover St.