CHICOPEE/HOLYOKE – Marches supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and calling for the end of police brutality drew hundreds of people to the cities of Chicopee and Holyoke during the week of June 2.

Simbrit Paskins and Stephany Marryshow were two of the lead organizers of the peaceful protest in Holyoke and assisted in organizing the Chicopee protest as well. Paskins said her and Marryshow were connected to the group, 413 Boricuas, by a fellow community member in Holyoke. From there, Paskins said they collaborated with three Latinex community leaders from the group, who had already begun to advertise the June 2 march on Facebook, and together were able to organize the event in a matter of days.

Paskins joked that the group was able to organize the event with “no sleep, not eating.” She then explained the few days they had to prepare for the protest, which consisted of a march and vigil, were filled with video conferencing calls and meetings. She said the quick call to action was intentional, “People want to act right now, they just want to get it done.”

Marryshow said the group did not apply for permits or request police assistance to block off roads during the march. “We wanted to do it without the permits. The whole purpose is to let them know we’re not happy with what’s going on. We did not ask for permission or streets to be blocked,” she explained. “A march or protest with permission is just a parade at one point.”

While the protest was only advertised for two days on social media, Paskins said by the time the march took place it had been a week since the death of George Floyd and no statements had been issued by the city or the police. Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis, Minn., was killed on May 23 after Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes.

“George Floyd had been killed a full week before the march and the police department hadn’t put out any statement,” she said. Paskins said while the Holyoke Police Department hadn’t been involved in Floyd’s death, police across the country needed to be held accountable. “The Holyoke Police Department didn’t kill George Floyd, but we have to hold our police accountable. Are they protesting us?” Paskins questioned.

This, she said, was why the organizers of the march and vigil hadn’t requested permission when putting the event together. “We don’t want to ask permission, if it mattered then you would have said something,” she said.

Paskins referenced Minneapolis, who took action in the days following Floyd’s death. Such action included school districts and the city’s parks and recreation department terminating contracts with the police department. “Minneapolis acted immediately, action was taken, statements made. Your people of color in these communities are struggling, they’re telling you the connection between the police and people of color is broken,” she said. “This is our community, we live here, we teach here and everyone’s acting like nothing happened.”

Paskins then explained that in the days leading up to the march, the organizers had little to no contact with the city. Marryshow and Paskins said they heard from Mayor Alex Morse the evening before the protest was scheduled to take place. Additionally, the pair said they had no contact with the Holyoke Police Department until the afternoon of the march took place when Police Chief Manny Febo approached them and said he would be willing to march with the crowd. Paskins called the interaction “frustrating.”

“The day of the protest when people started to show up, that’s the only time the Holyoke Police Department approached us,” she said. “It was frustrating, it didn’t make us feel like the actions were genuine. People are looking at it like we collaborated, but we didn’t.”

Marryshow said when Morse initially reached out, he offered to speak at the protest, but Paskins said even before Morse contacted the pair, leaders had decided they did not want people in positions of power to speak at the event. “Before he reached out, we made it clear it was a protest for the people by the people,” she said. “Positions of power take up space, and we wanted to keep it centered on the community members of Holyoke.”

Paskins confirmed that there were no incidents of violence at the event, despite the strong emotions and “righteous anger” of those who attended. “People came with their feelings and emotions just wanting to yell, but there was no violence, it went off without a hitch,” Paskins said. However, Marryshow said while they are happy there were no instances of violence, when marches escalate into riots, there is a reason. “Civil disobedience is exactly what it’s called. We are happy it stayed peaceful and things didn’t escalate,” she said. “Anger is righteous and understood, and a lot of time that turns into riots because people are feeling helpless.”

She said often in cases of protest, such as the one that took place in Holyoke, people still feel angry after they go home. “They came here, yelled, screamed, marched and now have to go home,” she said. Marrshow said she felt the protest stayed peaceful largely due to the hope organizers provided attendees at the end of the event. “It stayed the way it did because of the unity and solidarity and hope we give. Hopes and demands were given, the hope portion of that was for the community,” she said. “That sense of hope and togetherness helped to calm them.”

Marryshow and Paskins, who founded and created the Facebook group 413 Stay Woke, Stay Active, said the group was created to let people know there were ways to get involved following the protest. Marryshow said, “We let people know it doesn’t end here, we are going to continue to work to change things.”

In addition to giving people hope, Marryshow said organizers also gave a list of demands to the city of Holyoke. The demands, the pair said, are a template that can be used by people across Western Massachusetts, or even the country, to hold police accountable for their actions. The point, Paskins said, is to “have language around accountability,” for police departments around the commonwealth and across the country. One of the demands, she explained, given at the protest was for “community accountability for law enforcement in Holyoke.”

“It’s not just officers holding other officers accountable, if that was the case George Floyd wouldn’t have been killed,” Paskins said. She added that other demands included banning racist policing, which she said was “hard to name if the police department hasn’t had any anti-racist training.”, anti-racist training she said, was very different than minority, sensitivity or unconscious bias training. Anti-racist training, she explained, consisted of “specific language” that addresses systemic racism.

One of the most significant demands, according to Marryshow, was the desire for officers employed in the city of Holyoke “to sign a pledge that any innocent, unarmed person of color will not be killed in our city by our police officers.” Marryshow said it was important to emphasize the innocence of those being killed by police as “these people that are being killed aren’t being given the right to a trial.”

The pair emphasized that the demands given at the protest were a template and consisted of “basic demands that should already be in place,” Marryshow said. She continued, “We created this as a template for all and any police departments across America, we just want to build on that with Holyoke.” The Holyoke-specific demands, the pair said, were still being drafted at the time of press.

Two days after the protest on June 5, Morse and Febo released “an updated set of policies for the Holyoke Police Department in response to the outpouring of grassroots support for police reform around the country.” The updated guidelines, released in a statement to the community, follow the guidelines of the “8 Can’t Wait Campaign” sweeping the nation, calling for the termination of eight policies used by police forces in America. Polices the campaign include the use of chokeholds and strangleholds; the ban of shooting at moving vehicles; ensuring that all options are exhausted before shooting; requiring that all instances of force be reported; requiring a warning before shooting; requiring officers to stop another officer from using excessive force; and limiting what types of weapons of force and/or weapons that can be used to respond to specific types of resistance.

In addition to announcing the updated guidance and regulations, Morse announced that a Civilian Review Committee would be formed to “review the city’s policing policies and provide feedback and policy recommendations to the mayor, the chief of police and the city council in the event of necessary ordinance changes.” In the same release, Morse announced that he’d signed onto the Mayor’s Pledge. The pledge, issued by the Obama Foundation’s “My Brother’s Keeper Alliance,” calls on mayors across America to commit to reviewing the use of force policies within the city’s police department; engaging in the community “by including a diverse range of input, experiences, and stories”; reporting findings of reviews to the community and seeking feedback; and reforming the police department’s use of force policies.

Paskins, however, said “what was released by the mayor is not in alignment with the demands shared by the public.” She said at the time of print, “collective organizers are working on a way to communicate that to the public.”

Marryshow continued, and said, “They are also just a reiteration of things that are already in place.” She said the mayor’s statement was “confusing to the public” as the statement “sounded like it was a response, but it’s just like this is what we’re already doing, put a nice name on it.”

Paskins said the whole point of the protests, both in Holyoke and Chicopee, was to give people a space to have their voices heard. “We wanted people to feel valued, wanted people to have a space to be heard, not just a space to make noise,” she said.

She reflected on a book called “We Want To Do More Than Just Survive,” by Bettina Love. “That’s the sentiment of people, not just in Holyoke and Chicopee, but across the country.” She said the march brought forth a “cool sense of solidarity, centered around wanting to do more than just survive” where people of all races showed up “to do the work.”

“People in impoverished communities, we want to have more than a McDonald’s or a liquor store,” she said. Those, she said, have become known as staples in impoverished neighborhoods and communities across the country. “We want to do more than just survive off of unhealthy food. We want to be successful enough to graduate,” she said. “We don’t want to take up space, we want equal rights.”

Marryshow agreed, and continued, “We want to experience these equal rights everybody is talking about, it’s been over 400 years just to get a little bit of the pie, and learning that through educating people and being unapologetic and speaking our minds that we’re going to get what we need.”

Reminder Publishing reached out to the Holyoke Police Department for comment, but had not received comment as of press time.