Cops Arrested Over 3,500 Pro-Gaza Campus Protesters, New Data Shows

Edited by Sam Thielman

Hey, FOREVER WARS readers. We've got a treat for you today. Polygraph's Stephen Semler, one of my favorite newsletter writers on "national security," performed one of his signature data dives and visualizations for us! This time, he's got new information that punctures several myths around the campus protests for Palestine this past collegiate year. I was thrilled when he approached FOREVER WARS about publishing it—left to my own devices, I'm sure not doing any data viz!  

Make sure you subscribe to Polygraph to support Stephen's crucial work, and to FOREVER WARS to support ours. And also remember: I'm about to take over writing tasks on IRON MAN, so if you preorder IRON MAN at a comic-book store, I will send you free merch.

OK, enough plugging, here's Stephen Semler, everybody.—Spencer

NEW DATA SHOWS THE EXTENT of the nationwide police crackdown on campus activists protesting the war on Gaza. For FOREVER WARS, I collected arrest data for the 1,269 protests at colleges and universities tracked by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and cross-referenced each incident with reporting by media outlets between October 7 and June 28. My data show a nationwide crackdown on peaceful protests: that police have arrested at least 3,552 people across 81 college campuses for protesting the US-backed genocide in Gaza, and that more than 98 percent of these protests were peaceful. What follows is a look at and behind the numbers of the movement that captivated national attention.

THE DEMANDS of the campus protesters generally reflect those of the broader antiwar movement. Protesters want the Biden administration to force Israel to finally accept a ceasefire; students want their university administrations to call for a ceasefire. Protesters don’t want their tax dollars funding genocide, so they demand a halt of U.S. military aid to Israel. Students don’t want their tuition funding genocide, either, so they demand their university divest from companies that do business with the Israeli military.

Several universities chose to negotiate with protesters. Students agreed to end their encampments at schools like Brown, California Berkeley, Evergreen State, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Minnesota, Rutgers, Sacramento State, Wisconsin-Madison, and others in exchange for concessions from administrators that achieve or at least work towards their stated demands.

But other universities chose violence. The day after testifying before a Republican-led congressional inquiry into campus unrest, Columbia University president Minouche Shafik invited the New York Police Department (NYPD) to arrest protesters. “I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik wrote in a letter on April 18. “With great regret, we request the NYPD’s help to remove these individuals.” The NYPD arrested 108 protesters that night.

Emboldened by Shafik, many other university administrators promptly followed suit. Crackdowns on college campuses surged all across the country. According to the new data, from October 7 up until April 18, there had been 249 campus protests. Police had intervened in them 15 times, arresting 205. Since April 18, there have been 1,020 protests, 133 police interventions, and 3,347 arrests—on average, police now raid encampments twice as often and arrest twice as many protesters when they do. 

The strategy of mass arrests not only failed to deter protesters, it also sparked more campus protests, including at the sites of previous police raids. The Columbia encampment, for example, was rebuilt a couple days later, prompting Shafik to release a statement saying that she planned to again have police dismantle it. The police raids resulting from University administrators following Columbia’s lead inflicted plenty of harm on their students—reported injuries from rubber bullets, batons, and forcible arrests are commonplace. It seems fair to say that, given the increased number of protests, the crackdown ended up exacerbating the very “problem” they wished to solve.

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION gave political cover to the universities that employed a violent response to the protests. When President Biden addressed the campus protests on May 2, he portrayed the protests as violent and outside the bounds of protected speech.  “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent…But neither are we a lawless country,” Biden said. “Order must prevail.” A few weeks later, First Lady Jill Biden implied that the protests were largely violent during her appearance on The View.

The data leave no doubt that the Bidens’ words never matched the reality on campus. More than 98 percent of the campus protests have been peaceful. Of the more than 1,200 US campus protests recorded by ACLED between October 7 and June 28, there were just 23 instances where protesters damaged property or got into physical altercations with cops or counterprotesters. Nearly all of them were peaceful until the police or pro-Israel counterprotesters attacked the demonstrations. 

For example, on April 30, pro-Palestinian demonstrators continued their encampment on Dickson Plaza at UCLA. That night, around 100 pro-Israel counterprotesters wearing black outfits and white masks attacked. They threw tear gas canisters and fireworks into the encampment, sprayed protesters with mace and pepper spray, beat them with poles, wooden slabs, and other objects, and yelled anti-Palestinian and anti-African American slurs. Police stood by watching for three hours before intervening. Pro-Israel counterprotesters injured over 150 protesters, including at least 25 who were hospitalized with fractures, deep lacerations, and chemical burns. Police made no arrests. The pro-Israel assailants were allowed to walk away.

Early on May 1, police raided the same encampment, fired rubber bullets at those inside, and arrested more than 200 pro-Palestinian protesters.

THE UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION,  Irene Khan, said in April that the crisis in Gaza is becoming a global crisis of freedom of speech—one biased against pro-Palestianian voices. Khan identified the crackdown on U.S. campus protests as a prime example. Mainstream U.S. politicians and news outlets slandered nonviolent protesters as violent, antisemitic, terrorist sympathizers—anything to distract from the bloodsoaked Israeli policy enabled materially and diplomatically by the United States that the campus protesters sought to challenge.

However uncomfortable it may be for the current hero portrayals of Biden now that he's quit the presidential race, part of his Israel policy and his presidential legacy was to encourage a crackdown of such legitimate speech. But while such portrayals helped license the police repression, there's a lesson the data show about its efficacy. State violence and intimidation didn't stop the protest wave. The end of the term did that. And if the Biden—and Kamala Harris—administration continue the status quo, they can expect more resistance when school is back in session. 

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