Justin Ling is a freelance journalist who writes the Bug-eyed and Shameless newsletter. He is working on a book on police crowd-control tactics.
Columbia University professors demonstrate outside the Columbia campus demanding the release of students, in New York City, on May 1.CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/Getty Images
On Tuesday night, New York Police Department officers swept into Columbia University to arrest students for occupying their own campus. The mass arrest of students demanding that their school divest from companies supplying the Israeli military came 56 years to the day that cops arrested hundreds of anti-Vietnam War protesters on the same campus – a repeating of history that shows how we, as a broader society, have learned very few lessons since.
Right here in Canada, McGill University is opting for a similar tactic to deal with its own pro-Palestinian encampment. The school has asked Montreal police to break up the protest, citing “unequivocally antisemitic language and intimidating behaviour” – a request that, thus far, has been rebuffed by police, who note that “no crime is being committed.”
On Wednesday, a Quebec Superior Court judge rejected an injunction brought by two McGill students, ruling it would infringe other students’ right to “gather peacefully.”
We should hope it stays that way. Police intervention is an enormous mistake, and it’s as wrong today as it was a half-century ago.
Back in 1968, when protesters waved Viet Cong flags and chanted “kill the cops!”, university administrators and politicians justified police crackdowns in a variety of ways. They insisted that Communist infiltrators and professional radicals had co-opted anti-war protests and civil-rights demonstrations to destabilize the state. Those warnings, aired in Congress and printed in just about every major paper, proved to be fiction. Still, they justified heavy-handed crackdowns, such as in Chicago and at Columbia, which we look back on today with horror.
Max Frankel, then a New York Times journalist, distilled the feeling perfectly in 1968: “Our young deplore the violence of the old and are tempted to use violence against them. The old deplore the ferocity of the young and are tempted to use violence to suppress them.”
Despite this apparent regret, we continue to professionalize these crackdowns of demonstrators when we want to restore order – yet we often find it only prompts more chaos.
Think of the protests in Montreal in 2012, when picketing students were tear gassed, clubbed and arrested en masse. Or the demonstrations during the 2010 Group of 20 summit in Toronto, where police engaged in kettling and mass detention, mostly without charges. Or the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where police consistently escalated further violence and unrest, rather than preventing it. And now, warnings of Soviet agents have been replaced with fears of, as New York Mayor Eric Adams put it, “outside agitators.”
There is a time and place for police operations, of course – when an entire city is occupied by tractor trailers for weeks, for example. But it is high time we stop trying to solve social problems in riot gear.
I spent time at Columbia University last week. I spoke to students – including Jewish students, some of whom participated in the pro-Palestinian encampment – who told me they felt the university had wildly overreacted. They feared police violence more than violence from their fellow students.
Indeed, Columbia officials asked the police to break up the encampment on just its second day – prompting even more students to join the protest. At every step, the university’s attempts to force the students out have been met with more disobedience. It culminated Tuesday night, when hundreds of officers in riot gear stormed in to make arrests. Now, the administration is asking officers to remain for the next two weeks; if they agree, they will occupy campus to prevent the students from occupying campus.
This is obscene for an institution of higher learning, a sandbox that should be allowing students to develop their political selves without such ham-fisted meddling from the outside world.
This isn’t to say that concerns about antisemitism amongst the pro-Palestinian protesters aren’t legitimate; they absolutely are. Images went viral last month of protesters marching past Parliament buildings in Ottawa, yelling “long live October 7!” Students have been caught on camera at McGill yelling at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”
This rhetoric is grotesque. But it isn’t violence. Anyone caught actually inciting violence, or committing assault, should obviously be arrested and prosecuted. Unfortunately, universities – including McGill – have cited these few examples to justify a wholesale crackdown.
Universities would be better off simply doing nothing: Let the students’ encampment operate on its quad, and ignore them.
There are other options, however. Some universities, such as Brown and Northwestern, opted to meet protesters’ demands; others are still negotiating. Those who have opted for dialogue instead of confrontation have generally found their campuses more peaceful.
Calling in the police will only inflame things. It is still the worst possible solution.