On May 1, a grizzled Dartmouth professor was subdued, zip-tied and detained along with about 90 other protesters. “I’ve been teaching here for 34 years,” said Annelise Orleck New York Times After video of the arrest went viral. “There have been a lot of protests, but I’ve never seen riot police out.”
Much of the debate about the campus protests sparked by the Israel-Hamas war has focused, quite reasonably, on issues surrounding free speech, civil disobedience, and violence. When does a slogan turn into a threat? When does preventing access to a building turn into a use of force? Less attention has been paid to the role of the police. But even though Americans have become numb to the militarization of police in other contexts, seeing officers in riot gear on college campuses is shocking.
This spring, about 2,700 protesters were arrested or detained at dozens of schools. At UCLA, where nearly 200 people were arrested recently, police intervened hours after counterprotesters stormed the encampment. At the University of Virginia, students (and a reason Journalists) were hit with pepper spray and dragged off the lawn along with their tents; 25 students were arrested or detained.
While clearing an encampment in Columbia, the New York Police Department (NYPD) used a specialized vehicle with a ramp nicknamed “The Bear” to gain access to the second floor of a building housing dozens of students. Police wearing helmets and brandishing ballistic shields stormed the building and the encampment outside. They used flash grenades. A New York police officer opened fire at the university’s Hamilton Hall. (An NYPD spokesperson later told a local publication, Citythe officer was using a gun “equipped with a flashlight” to view an area cordoned off by students, and then “accidentally” fired.
Witnesses initially posted on program handed over to the U.S. Department of Defense) was later embraced by police departments. The program has been scaled back, but interest in such vehicles has not. The “Bear” turned out to be a Panda, a tactical vehicle now popular with police and available for purchase from private suppliers. The NYPD has several; a batch purchased in 2005 sold for $225,000 each.
ten years since the last reason Journalist Radley Balko writes Rise of the police warriormost major cities and many college towns have seen the normalization of a paramilitary policing mentality and the use of SWAT teams in daily police operations.
But using these tactics on college campuses in the context of political protest should be an opportunity to examine the tools and power police have and the difficulty of the tasks assigned to them.
As protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police took to the streets in the summer of 2020, aggressive policing was both debated and on display. Urban crime surged after these protests, in part because police may have become overly cautious or resentful due to state scrutiny. But in most cities, the crime wave has receded, casting doubt on that explanation. (Washington is an exception, for reasons that defy simple explanation, as Joe Bishop-Hinchman, a community commissioner in Washington, D.C., explains.) Around the same time, homeless tent encampments began popping up in the city The massive increase raises thorny questions about policing urban camping. (reasonCJ Ciaramella looks to Miami for answers to homelessness.
Even when the rules regarding when, where, and how to protest are clear, content-neutral, and unambiguously constitutional, universities often lack the funds to clean up encampments themselves. In the Dartmouth arrests, police conducted the raid at the request of the university president within hours of the first signs of the encampment. But as the national attention on the decision and the disasters at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere illustrate, many universities are right to be cautious when calling in off-campus law enforcement.
The mindset and training of law enforcement officers are unlikely to adapt to subtle changes in situations. Local police are also unlikely to understand the subtleties of First Amendment protected conduct. For now, university presidents (and the President of the United States) appear to have internalized the lessons learned at Kent State and resisted the temptation to involve actual military forces. The arrests at Dartmouth come on the 54th anniversary of the Ohio National Guard’s fatal shooting of four students during anti-war protests on that campus, but so far enforcement actions have been strictly civilian.
But this puts the university and police in a difficult situation that is not of their own making. Although protesters often make demands of campus administrators, often regarding divestment and diversity, these demands tend to be minor and mostly beside the point. They are angry about U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, and the victims and targets of their protests have little ability to change that. But with national politics focusing so much on college campuses, the temptation to make a fuss on campus is too strong to ignore.
Likewise, by equipping themselves to be as big and scary as possible, the police instead limit their ability to deal with the human-scale problems that will actually arise in 2024, whether that’s crime, homelessness, or protest.
Elsewhere in this issue, contributing editor Matt Welch analyzes the distortions in U.S. foreign policy caused by the massive buildup of the U.S. armed forces, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously questioned in 1993 As embodied: “What’s the point of having such great military power? Always talking about if we can’t use it?”
The same mentality is prevalent at home. Whether abroad or at home, the U.S. approach now is to send expensive, over-equipped police into situations that desperately need de-escalation.
*Correction: The original version of this article misstated which presidential administration is responsible for the 1033 Program.
