Crime

Just because you're paranoid . . .

by Ben Geman

Sometime between last Friday evening and early Saturday afternoon, someone stole two iMacs, a copy machine, a fax machine, a printer, and petty cash from the Center for Campus Organizing (CCO), a Boston nonprofit group that helps facilitate student activism. Activists say they believe the burglary may have been politically motivated.

The break-in at the group's Friend Street office is probably just standard-issue petty crime. Still, according to CCO executive director Erin Clare Quinn, 21, whoever hit the group also took files relating to organizing work she did for another nonprofit, involving the tumultuous 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Furthermore, she says, other office materials appeared to have been searched. "If it was just people who wanted to get the goods, I don't see why organizing files were important to them," she says.

Forgive progressive activists for worrying. Pennsylvania state police infiltrated protest preparations surrounding the Republican National Convention over the summer. Back here last March, the Lawrence offices of the Massachusetts Green Party and the national Green Party USA were burglarized, with computers and other items taken.

Green Party activist Jonathan Leavitt pointed out back then that offices of the Lawrence Grassroots Initiative, located in the same building, were also searched, but nothing was stolen; that made him wonder about motives too. There's a long and ugly history, he noted, of government messing with radical groups.

Maybe it's not over.