Protesters are held at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) on May 2, 2024. | Photo credit: Reuters
Police arrested pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses across the US overnight, most notably at the University of California, Los Angeles, where chaotic scenes unfolded early Thursday as officers in riot gear moved into a crowd of demonstrators and made arrests.
Police removed barricades and began dismantling the protesters’ fortified encampment at UCLA after hundreds of demonstrators defied orders to leave. Some of them formed human chains as police fired flash bangs to disperse the crowd.
Numerous demonstrators were arrested, their hands tied with zip ties.
The action came after officers threatened arrests over loudspeakers for hours if people did not disperse. A crowd of more than a thousand people had gathered on campus, both inside and outside a barricaded tent camp, in support. Protesters and police pushed and scuffled.
Protesters chanted: “Where were you last night?” to the officers, referring to Tuesday night, when counterprotesters attacked the camp and took the UCLA administration and campus police hours to respond.
Tent camps of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across the country. The subsequent police action mirrored actions that took place decades ago against a much larger protest movement protesting the Vietnam War.
Yale University police arrested four people Wednesday evening after about 200 protesters marched to the school president’s home and to the campus police station.
In Oregon, police have begun clearing protesters from a library at Portland State University.
The protests at UCLA seemed to get the most attention. Iranian state television broadcast live footage of the police action, as did Qatar’s pan-Arab Al Jazeera satellite network. Live footage from Los Angeles was also shown on Israeli television networks.
