Greetings from the Community Safety Priority Implementation Team.
We are nearly halfway through the year, and we would like to send an update to the chapter about what we’ve been up to and what we have coming up.
First of all, we are pleased to announce Digital Self-Defense, a training on May 18th, at 7:00pm. Most people don’t realize just how much information about ourselves we leave in our online wake, much more than just our Facebook, Instagram or Mastodon posts. An infosec organizer will teach you about how bad actors could gather information about you online and how to keep your personal information safe. You can register here.
The other thing that’s coming together is our series of Stop The Bleed trainings. STB is a project by the American College of Surgeons to train emergency bleeding management techniques. hese trainings are hands on and require instructors to supervise students when practicing with the human analogs.
For our first Stop the Bleed training, we are prioritizing comrades who are eligible to themselves become trainers. If you are in one of the categories listed here, that means you! We are doing this because these trainings are in high demand, and even with multiple instructors, there are limits to how many students can be practicing with the human analogs at any given time. This first training will be on Thursday May 25, at 7pm at the Democracy Center near Harvard Square.
The Community Safety Priority officially kicked off with the solidarity rally for the Fall River Pride Committee’s Drag Queen Story Hour on January 14. Since then the FRPC has consistently been running DQSH events every month. We have continued to do this type of work, helping with security/community defense for several other drag events.
We have run trainings every month since January, including Protest Roles, Personal De-Escalation Skills, Making Event Safety/De-Escalation Plans and Protest Health and Safety. In addition, we have run the Event Safety/De-Escalation Plan training for community groups that were either targeted by or at risk for being targeted by the far right.
Near the end of April, in response to a call from Stop the Sweeps Boston, we launched a two-week project to monitor the Mass & Cass area in order to monitor and document City of Boston and police behavior in anticipation of a sweep. Through the priority, Boston DSA coordinated this project and chapter members provided the large majority of volunteers, with numerous comrades collectively providing hundreds of hours of coordination, developing instructions for how to engage respectfully with the unhoused community and how to perform different roles, monitoring, offsite support, communications, information-gathering, recruitment, and raising or donating funds for gift cards for unhoused residents of the Mass & Cass community. This work was instrumental in pressuring the City to back down from a full sweep. Thanks as well to the comrades from the Socialists in Office chapter priority who worked with our elected comrade Kendra Lara.
We are entering what is likely to be the busiest part of the year for those involved in the Community Safety Priority. June is the traditional Pride Month, and the queer community is under attack from the far right. Likewise, the summer is usually the busiest time for protests.
Solidarity,
Joey P
Coordinating Committee
Community Safety Priority