Campus Protests: Police Clashes at Columbia University and UCLA Prove They Don’t Belong There

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I keep having this problem when I go somewhere to interview sources and by the time I get there, they’ve been arrested. Maybe your scrolling on social media can back that up. The numbers certainly do: According to journalists at the Appeal, at least 2,500 people have been arrested at campus Palestine protests in the last month.

Did you see that one TikTok (that at the time of writing surpassed 1.6 million likes) of state troopers approaching UT Austin? How about the comment asking, “Where were they for UVALDE?”

Or the footage of UCLA students being shot with rubber bullets by police? Or beaten there by counter-demonstrators the night prior? According to the Los Angeles Times, it took three hours for police to intervene. The Times reported that scattered public safety officers and police were standing to the side and observing while students were attacked. Per the Times, a student journalist for UCLA’s Daily Bruin was followed by pro-Israel counterprotesters, who encircled her just before 3:30 a.m.:

The Daily Bruin reported that some 25 students, including Hamilton, were hospitalized. As the staff put it in the headline of an editorial condemning the university's response to the encampment: “UCLA is complicit in violence inflicted upon protesters, failed to protect students.” (Teen Vogue reached out to UCLA and the LAPD for comment).

After weeks of police involvement in campus protests, this week saw a notable ratcheting up of intensity. Police were dispatched into Columbia and City College of New York in droves. Pictures and video circulated of professors at WashU in St. Louis, Dartmouth College and UW Madison bleeding or trampled after altercations with police. Students were teargassed by officers at Virginia Commonwealth University and University of Southern Florida. Some City University of New York students arrested at CCNY remained in jail awaiting arraignment over 32 hours after arrest, though in New York the standard is to be arraigned in 24 hours. (In response to request for comment, NYPD directed Teen Vogue to a May 1 press conference.) As far away as France, universities are deploying riot police in response to student protesters. We’re at a point where the same day encampments go up, police come to clear them out.

Are you picking up a theme here? The police are not there to protect students. They’re making that abundantly clear. But that’s also not news.

Campuses are already policed by their existing public safety units, as well as local police. In 2020, I profiled a campaign to get cops off campuses with a focus on Virginia Commonwealth University, where they successfully campaigned to prevent police as the first point of contact in mental health crisis situations after an 24-year-old alum was killed by police during such a crisis. This week, students at VCU were pepper-sprayed for setting up a campus encampment. Dozens of schools succeeded in getting cops off their campuses in 2020, but by 2022, some of those same districts had brought them right back despite, as one expert source told Teen Vogue at the time, “we see no evidence of policing making schools safer.”

The movement to get cops out of schools long predates 2020, of course. In 2019, I analyzed a year’s worth of information about the securitization of schools post-Parkland, speaking to over 60 students and teachers. Many of those sources told Teen Vogue that the decision to install armed school resource officers (SROs) actually made Black and brown students feel less safe, policed in their own institutions.

In recent weeks, professors have canceled their classes because they refuse to send their students into militarized campuses. On April 18, when Columbia first invited police to arrest students and dismantle its student encampment, I stood next to three young students who had come to campus for class that day, as we watched riot cops direct facilities workers to take apart the tents. One, a hijabi, said she wouldn’t have come if she’d known police would be called to campus. Another asked around for a face mask, fearful of being monitored on her way home. They were not protesters and they were not a part of the protest.

All this, before dozens of schools sent riot cops into their campuses from the 18th onward. All this, a decade after NYPD sent an undercover cop into a student club at Brooklyn College to surveil Muslim students.

Remember in March 2022, when Biden got cheers from Congress after declaring “fund the police” during his State of the Union, less than two years after people nationwide — including on college campuses — called for their local and campus departments to be disbanded? Police forces across the country may publicly bellyache about a lack of funding or support, but since 2020, we’ve seen no shortage of police funding, or of policing approaches previously disbanded for their violence simply being copied and recreated elsewhere, and tens of millions invested in constructing new police training facilities in places like Atlanta. Indeed, as soon as 2021, there was a marked increase in the criminalization of protests. By 2022, “progressive” prosecutors were facing ouster over attempts at bail reform and the false narrative that policing budgets had been cut.

In New York City, mayor Eric Adams has chosen to promote budget cuts for libraries rather than for police. Adams went on national television and said Columbia students were harboring “outside agitators” but the campus had been closed to visitors, including the press, for most of the previous two weeks, with the NYPD stationed outside throughout. So is it that the police were there to keep students safe or to protect “order”? If so, how would they have gotten swindled by that many kids? Adams and the NYPD don’t even have their story straight yet. Their decision to send in riot police to arrest the “outside agitators” has thus far reportedly borne out maybe one non-Columbia-affiliated person so far, after claiming the building occupation wasn’t student-run.

“I shouldn't be, but I remain stunned that we could go through something like the Uvalde situation, where people who say that we must have policing in schools heard in graphic detail about 21 killed as the cops stood outside the classrooms for 77 minutes,” abolitionist Mariame Kaba told Teen Vogue in 2023, in an interview with Kaba and Andrea Ritchie about their book No More Police. “There's a parent [who was] sleeping outside the door in protest of the police, who wants ‘justice’ for his dead child. And people have completely moved on.”

Kaba was saying she shouldn’t have been surprised because, she and Ritchie argue, “Policing itself announces a form of insecurity in the culture and in this society, and then it sucks nutrients out of our system. It actually makes everything less safe, just the presence and existence [of police]... Inserting policing within spaces where young people would like to congregate is just a recipe for escalation and violence.” Two years after Uvalde, we’re seeing that as more than a thousand students are targeted for their protest.

It’s also impossible not to mention that students are protesting on their campuses in part because Gaza’s universities — a source of nutrients for residents — have been razed to the ground, with surviving students and academics forced to flee.

And while public officials like New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu claim the police presence is due to accusations of antisemitism made against the student movement, the police are also arresting and brutalizing Jewish students and professors. The Dartmouth professor who was arrested, 65-year-old Annelise Orleck, former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program, told WMUR, “As a Jewish woman of an age that grew up in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors and knew Holocaust survivors, I have to say that I think this is disingenuous. It's a weaponizing of antisemitism for their own political purposes, which is to suppress dissent."

On May 2, President Biden told the media that the arrest of hundreds of people who likely voted for him in 2020 left him unmoved on his policy after he had spent weeks criticizing them and changing the subject. We are just shy of seven months of war in Gaza. It is safe to assume the student movement will similarly be unmoved by his lack of action. The Democratic National Convention approaches this summer, so who do you think has more staying power: An 81-year-old defender of the police who has alienated many of his constituents or student protesters who have been facing down the cops since October? As the students keep chanting: “The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be.”

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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