Task force occupies oppressed communities
By
Bryan G. Pfeifer
Springfield, Mass.
Published Mar 30, 2005 10:59 AM
Under the guise
of “fighting crime,” the state of Massachusetts and city of
Springfield started “Operation Safe Springfield” March
20.
This new special task force is composed of almost all white city
police officers, state troopers using their K-9 unit and others, bolstering the
existing police force on all three shifts with more numbers on the
midnight-to-8-a.m. shift.
The task force’s goal is to curb crime and
make the city “safe.” That’s according to Massachusetts Public
Safety Secretary Edward A. Flynn, who announced its imple mentation the week of
March 13. Flynn said the new measures will be funded by more than $500,000 in
state funds. Springfield will also receive $900,000 from the state over two
fiscal years to pay city police overtime.
According to various news
reports 10 state troopers, or one-third of the barracks staff, will patrol.
Furthermore, the state police undercover unit will be working with the city
police forces.
(www.masslive.com)
Although the funding is coming
from taxpayer funds, Flynn and others involved refuse to disclose how many city
cops and troopers are members of the task force, citing the need to keep this
information from “criminals.”
The deployment of the task force
thus far is being concentrated in primarily Black and Latin@ Springfield
neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have been decimated by plant closings and
other economic and racist attacks, which have resulted in social challenges such
as homelessness, health-care epidemics such as addiction, and school
closings.
While outside these communities selling drugs, sex work and
other jobs are vilified as “criminal acts,” they are understood in
poor communities as forms of economic survival, even though they may be
undesirable. Often the poor and unemployed or underemployed have no
choice.
There are no living-wage, union jobs in their communities. Social
safety nets have been slashed or destroyed. And the realities of racism, sexism
and lesbian/gay/bi/ trans oppression are everywhere.
Repression
and occupation not safety
Behind the packaged news
conferences and media reports, the ruling class and its state, here and
nationwide, are fast implementing the repressive apparatus to subdue the working
class and oppressed as massive class-wide resistance builds on fronts from
student and worker struggles to the anti-war movement. Springfield is an
excellent example.
In Springfield the Finance Control Board’s
relentless attacks on unionized workers, and on the working-class and oppressed
communities as a whole, are creating more anger and fight-back
sentiment.
The high-profile, savage beating of high-school principal
Nicholas Greer by four white cops in November, and the subsequent acquittal of
the cops and rampant police terror in the oppressed communities, are creating a
cauldron of anger and resistance.
Awareness that city and state taxpayer
money is being stolen to fund the Penta gon’s occupation of Iraq is
increasing. So is resistance to the economic draft, as working-class and
oppressed families increasingly oppose their loved ones entering the
military.
Those involved with the task force are banking on the ploy of
blaming the victims of capitalism for success in their occupation and
repression. A central goal is to divide white workers from oppressed
working-class communities by smearing the latter, in the most vile manner, as
less than human “criminals.”
The only real
“safety” the task force and other occupying forces of the state are
supposed to protect is the bosses’ safety to exploit and super-exploit the
working class and oppressed, and to maintain divisions and fractures between
them .
Working-class whites must reject the ruling class’s racist
plans and unite with oppressed people fighting back while respecting
self-determination up to and including armed self-defense against the occupying
forces in Springfield and elsewhere.
A beginning in Springfield could be a
demand to immediately abolish the task force and reallocate the money toward the
communities’ immediate needs.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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