Los Angeles police officers leveled the tents at the pro-Palestinian protest at the University of California at Los Angeles early Thursday, after pushing through barricades, deploying stun grenades, and taking over most of the encampment in a pre-dawn raid. Several protesters were detained. At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, police arrested 90 protesters, including a 65-year-old professor who described her arrest as “brutal.”
As of Thursday morning, at least 1,800 people had been arrested on campuses nationwide, according to a count kept by The Washington Post.
Yale University said four protesters – two students and two non-students – were arrested at a protest Wednesday night. In New York state, police arrested 29 people at Stony Brook University early Thursday, including faculty members and students. At Fordham University, 15 protesters who had set up an indoor encampment were arrested.
Officers were summoned to clear protesters at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, arresting at least 34 people. At the University of Texas at Dallas, administrators said 17 people were charged with criminal trespass after police cleared an encampment.
At UCLA, under a pre-dawn sky, many of the remaining demonstrators began leaving, taking a route down the quad’s Janss Steps to avoid the police.
Dozens of people filed out, many wearing helmets, face masks and kaffiyehs.
“Walk down the stairs, hold each other’s hands!” an organizer with a megaphone directed as demonstrators left. “Be safe!”
Even as the crowd thinned, protesters kept up some chants. One person stood on a low wall, waving a Palestinian flag.
“You can’t stop us!” came through the megaphone, a call-and-response. “We’ll be back!”
About 1 a.m. local time, police had entered the scene of the encampment at UCLA. They were met with chants of “peaceful protest,” while other demonstrators chanted “free free Palestine,” “the people united will never be divided” and “where were you last night?” in reference to an attack by counterprotesters on the encampment’s barricade on Wednesday.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said administrators will investigate the Wednesday incident. He added that the investigation could lead to arrests or expulsions.
Video footage from early Thursday morning showed officers removing some barricades and attempting to push through a line of protesters. Some protesters were seen throwing umbrellas at police and using planks of wood and giant placards to form a wall. A series of booms were heard shortly before 3:30 a.m. local time as fireworks were set off.
Later, police appeared to be using stun grenades as they move in to clear protesters at the UCLA encampment. Regular loud bangs could be heard at the scene, and protesters were frantically making new barricades.
At Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. police moved in to dismantle a protest encampment on Wednesday night, arresting 90 people on charges including criminal trespass and resisting arrest, Police Chief Charles B. Dennis said early Thursday.
In a statement, the chief said demonstrators at a planned protest had erected tents and an encampment on the college’s Dartmouth Green despite being warned by the school’s Safety and Security Division that they were forbidden. Videos shared by protest organizers showed dozens of tents springing up on the Green, bearing signs calling for Dartmouth to stop investing in companies involved in Israel’s war effort.
“Hanover Police along with the New Hampshire State Police made multiple announcements to disperse and while some chose to leave, many stayed,” Dennis said. According to the police statement, the law enforcement response included the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit, a team of officers trained in SWAT tactics. Those arrested included Dartmouth students and others, he added.
Shortly before midnight, the Dartmouth student newspaper reported that the last of the tents was cleared by police.
Josh Paul, a former State Department official who quit the Biden administration last year over its handling of the conflict in Gaza, canceled his participation on a panel at Dartmouth scheduled for Thursday after witnessing police action against protesters overnight.
In a phone interview, Paul said he visited the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus Wednesday night, which he described as a peaceful gathering. Facing the protesters was a line of police in riot gear, he said, who picked out protesters individually – some were pushed to the ground and handcuffed with zip ties – before putting them into vans.
“Dartmouth’s decision to turn to police tactics and brute force within hours of the establishment of a peaceful encampment flies in the face of their academic mission, and destroys the trust of their community,” Paul said.
Jeff Sharlet, a professor in the college’s department of English and creative writing who witnessed the protest and the police response, told The Washington Post that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators were nonviolent. “In the hour or so it was allowed to exist, this was the model of a peaceful, inclusive protest,” he said in an email Thursday morning. “They obstructed nothing; disrupted nothing; menaced nobody; and neither used nor displayed hate speech.”
In a statement, the Dartmouth New Deal Coalition, one of the encampment’s organizers, accused law enforcement of responding disproportionately to the protest. “Police used excessive force, with 4 heavily armed police officers tackling a Dartmouth professor,” the organization said. The Hanover Police Department did not have anyone available to provide an immediate response early Thursday.
Video broadcast by local television news outlet WMUR showed a line of police officers on Dartmouth Green facing off against the protesters, who linked arms and chanted. In one video, two police officers walked up to the line of protesters and detained one of them, removing the person from the line while other protesters booed. According to WMUR’s report, this process happened “once or twice” a minute for at least 45 minutes.
Dartmouth history professor Annelise Orleck said she was among the 90 protesters arrested on Dartmouth Green, describing in a telephone interview Thursday how police pushed her to the ground, knelt on her back and fastened her hands in zip ties.
Orleck, 65, said she was charged with criminal trespass and is forbidden from entering Dartmouth’s campus as a condition of her bail after attending a pro-Palestinian protest on campus. “Brutal is the word that I’m using. It was punitive,” she said.
The historian said she and other members of Dartmouth’s faculty arrived around 9 p.m. Wednesday to form a protective cordon around student protesters on Dartmouth Green, in the hope of acting as a “buffer” between them and police. “I just started videoing with my camera. Without warning, I was just rushed from behind by several state troopers. They grabbed my phone,” she recalled. After trying to get her phone back, Orleck said that between two and four police officers tackled her. “I told them: ‘I’m 65 years old. I’m old enough to be your mother!’”
Dartmouth College did not respond to a request by email early Thursday for comment on the arrests.
In a video shared by a reporter at the scene, Orleck can be seen arguing with police clad in body armor, moments before they grab her and one pushes her to the ground. “I did nothing wrong, nothing illegal, nothing in violation of the policies that the college set out earlier that day,” Orleck said.
The University of Vermont announced it will disclose a list of its investments this week, school spokesman Adam White told The Washington Post – a rare victory for pro-Palestinian protesters, who have called for universities to disclose ties with and divest from businesses linked to Israel.
(c) Washington Post
