I’ve Covered Violent Crackdowns on Protests for 15 Years. This Police Overreaction Was Unhinged.

A lone Trash can lay on its side at the intersection of W. 139th St and Amsterdam Ave in Harlem, in front of the gates of the City College of New York.

At around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, this was the extent of damaged property that I witnessed outside the college campus. At the same time, New York Police Department officers in riot regalia had amassed in their hundreds, including members of the Strategic Response Group — a unit dedicated to public unrest and “counterterrorism.”

More police had stormed through the school’s neo-Gothic gates less than an hour before, at the behest of the college’s president, to arrest protesting students en masse.

Twenty blocks south, police had locked down and barricaded all streets in a two-block radius of Columbia University, brutally arresting students inside the inaccessible campus.

Between Columbia and City College, over 200 protesters — almost all students — were arrested before the night was out.

It was a police response reminiscent of the repression that met protesters in the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. Nearly four years ago, police also responded with extraordinary violence to a mass protest. Then, the alleged provocation involved crucial acts of militant resistance, including low-level but widespread property damage, scattered looting, and the burning of several empty police vehicles.

Tuesday was different. In recent days on the campuses in Manhattan and across the country, massive police operations came in response to peaceful student encampments. Students gathered to share food, maintaining space to hold teach-ins and rallies, and demand their universities divest from Israel.

At Columbia, student protesters took over one university building: Hamilton Hall, the same building seized by students in 1968 in protest of the Vietnam War. At most, the latest building occupation saw a few broken windowpanes and some furniture moved around.

I have never witnessed, at the scene of a protest, the use of police power so disproportionate to the type of demonstration taking place.

The negligible acts of property damage were not, of course, what was being policed. Nor was the holding of campus space; students have done this before in recent decades without their university administrators inviting the force of militarized police.

Instead, it was the protesters’ message that was being handcuffed — the condemnation of Israel and the calls for a free Palestine — and young peoples’ commitment to it.

I have been reporting on political dissent and violent policing for 15 years, particularly in New York City. Compared to Tuesday night, I have never witnessed, at the scene of a protest, the use of police power so disproportionate to the type of demonstration taking place.

Make no mistake: This is an authoritarian escalation.

The “Outside Agitator” Myth

The crackdown on campuses offered a grim continuity: Police and other officials churned out all the same old excuses for quashing resistance. Most notably, their rhetoric relied on the predictable canard of the “outside agitator.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams trotted it out as grounds for sending in an army of baton-wielding cops against the city’s students. And Deputy Police Commissioner Tarik Sheppard went even further on MSNBC Wednesday morning, brandishing an unremarkable chain lock — the sort of which I’ve seen on bikes everywhere — as proof that “professionals,” not students themselves, had carried out the takeover of the Columbia building.

The bike-lock business quickly came in for rightly deserved mockery, but the “outside agitator” myth is no joking matter.

In this current moment, the “outside agitators” conjured are both the perennial anarchist bogeymen or Islamist terror groups sending funds to keep student encampments flush with the cheapest tents available online.

The “outside agitator” trope has a long, racist legacy, including use by the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1930s, the Klan issued flyers in Alabama claiming that “paid organizers for the communists are only trying” to get Black people “in trouble.” The allegation does double rhetorical harm by denying the agency and commitment of organizers themselves and suggesting that “outside” support from beyond a given locale or institution is somehow a bad thing.

More recently, the canard has been hauled out in defense of movement repression in Atlanta, against Stop Cop City protesters who had made a national call for backup. And it was a common refrain for politicians nationwide during the 2020 uprising, as well as discourse around the earlier Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson after police killed Mike Brown.

Blaming outside agitators or interests always was a propaganda ploy and remains so now. The idea that Palestinian liberation struggle is a mere proxy for Iranian interests repeats the delegitimizing logic of the past.

In fact, the Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses are student-organized and led, with Palestinian students at front and center, and a disproportionately large presence of Jewish students too. It is students, over 1,000 of them, who have faced arrest.

It also happens that millions of people have called for an end to Israel’s genocidal war, and support for Palestinian liberation is not and must not be limited to the mythic and maligned terrain of campus activism.

Authoritarian Americanism

Brutal policing and groundless excuses are nothing new, nor is bipartisan support for the crackdowns.

What is new, though, is a most pernicious constellation coming together: far-right attacks on education; white supremacist police repression, further escalated and enabled since 2020; a time of grasping U.S. hegemony abroad; Islamophobic and anti-Arab racism sanctioned in public since the war on terror; and, crucially, an enfeebled left, at least on the electoral level.

Antisemitism allegations are cynically deployed against anti-Zionist speech and twisted to permit every manner of authoritarian abuse — including a genocidal war.

These conditions set the backdrop for the one unassailable excuse, a claim beyond challenge and ripe for manipulation and weaponization: the charge of antisemitism.

Conscientious observers have become all too aware of how this allegation is cynically deployed against anti-Zionist speech and twisted to permit every manner of authoritarian abuse — including a genocidal war.

It is no accident that this indefensible police crackdown comes in service of an indefensible war. The very extremity of protest repression speaks to desperation on the part of institutions of the American establishment.

Israel’s decimation of Gaza has — at least for millions more people — given lie to the redemptive myths of the post-World War II political liberal order. Young people, even the children of the elite, even children of Zionists, are standing with Palestine. Their peaceful acts of protest count as disruptive because they count as un-American — which should be a badge of honor amid a U.S.-backed genocide.

City College President Vince Boudreau, in his letter inviting the NYPD to storm the campus, made specific note of the fact that protesters had refused to take down a Palestinian flag from a flagpole.

After the police had cleared the campus of the students who belong there and filled the space with cops instead, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry pulled down the Palestinian flag and raised the American one to full mast in its place.

Riot cops cheered below.

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