… Columbia University administrators called in the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Wednesday evening to violently suppress and shut down a pro-Palestinian student occupation of the campus’ Butler Library. Approximately 78 protesters were arrested just over a year after the police-state crackdown at Columbia last April, when the NYPD swarmed the campus to arrest over 100 students and break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”
On Wednesday afternoon, a group of around 100 anti-genocide student protesters took over Butler’s main reading room and renamed it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” after the Palestinian activist and writer killed by Israeli forces in 2017.
The students’ demands include Columbia’s financial divestment from Zionist organizations, an academic boycott of complicit institutions, cops and ICE off campus and amnesty for all university members unfairly targeted and disciplined for pro-Palestinian actions.
Columbia’s Public Safety officers immediately responded and violently barred protesters from leaving unless they showed identification, which created a prolonged standoff…
The “violent police response” was in response to the protesters turning violent when they were locked in the building that they illegally took over. The police locked them in so they could identify and/or arrest every one of them as they came out, but the protesters didn’t want to be identified and held accountable for their actions, so they turned violent. That violence was met with resistance by the police, in the form of physical restraint.
It’s all on video btw. We can see that the protesters are the ones that first became violent.
They had no requirement to identify themselves to campus Public Safety Officers. PSO’s are not police. Locking them in the building is clearly unlawful detainment, and must invalidate any trespass charge as they were prevented from leaving (to be guilty of trespass you must first be notified and then remain in spite of being allowed to leave). Reasonable force is aboslutely an appropriate response to unlawful detainment.