SWAT Goes to College

A GRAY-HAIRED DARTMOUTH professor was tackled, zip-tied, and detained on May 1 along with about 90 other protesters.

- Katherine Mangu

“I’ve been teaching here for 34 years,” Annelise Orleck told The New York Times after video of the arrest went viral. “There have been many protests, but I’ve never, ever seen riot police called to the green.”

Much of the debate about the campus protests sparked by the Israel-Hamas war has centered—quite reasonably—on questions around free speech, civil disobedience, and violence. When do chants become threats? When does blocking access to a building become the use of force? Less attention has been paid to the role of policing. But even as Americans have become numb to the militarization of police in other contexts, there’s something shocking about the sight of cops in riot gear on college campuses.

About 2,700 protesters have been arrested or detained at dozens of schools this spring. At UCLA, nearly 200 arrests recently occurred, with police stepping in many hours after counterprotesters attacked the encampment. At the University of Virginia, students (and one Reason reporter) were hit with pepper spray and then hauled off the lawn along with their tents; 25 students were arrested or detained.

While clearing an encampment at Columbia, the New York Police Department (NYPD) used a specialized vehicle with a ramp, nicknamed “the bear,” to access the second story of a building occupied by a few dozen students. Police stormed the building and the encampment outside it wearing helmets and wielding ballistic shields. They used flash-bang grenades. One New York Police officer discharged a weapon in the university’s Hamilton Hall. (An NYPD spokesman later told a local publication, The City, that the officer had been using a firearm “equipped with a flashlight” to see around an area barricaded by students when he fired the gun “accidentally.”)