D.C. police showed the rest of America how to respond to this historic wave of campus protests across the nation: They did nothing.
And it was perfect.
While other police forces are providing highlight reels of enforcers marching on university quads in riot gear (from California to New York, Illinois to Texas) or galloping in on horseback (just Texas), officers carrying and dragging students away or shockingly slamming an Emory University professor to the ground in Georgia, the cops here in the nation’s capital gave the ivory tower a lesson in constitutional rights.
“This activity has remained peaceful,” a D.C. police spokesperson said, explaining why there have been no arrests at the George Washington University campus, despite the administration’s request for backup.
So far, at least 900 people have been arrested on U.S. campuses during protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza. And in nearly every case, the demonstrations were peaceful and nonviolent until law enforcement showed up.
The only action that may have seemed justifiable was at Northeastern University, where police cleared an encampment after reports that “Kill the Jews” was yelled at a demonstration, though there were conflicting reports on where the hate speech came from.
For the most part, the headlines are “Protesters and Police clash on Pitt’s campus” and “Police crackdown leads to hundreds of arrests.”
Not “Protesters set fire, hurt people and then police were called.”
When the folks at GWU tried to get D.C. police — a force with plenty of legit action to keep them busy around the rest of the city — to break up what looked more like a street fair on campus last week, the police said “no thanks” and kept a low-key presence close by.
“They definitely made the right call,” said Ivy Ken, an associate professor of sociology at GWU and one of dozens of faculty members who signed a letter protesting the suppression of demonstrations on university campuses in the region and suspension of student protesters.
In most cases, universities are calling police because they have decided that the students who spend major bucks to study on their verdant lawns are now trespassers.
“Their encampment at the plaza does not interfere with the regular operations of the university in any way,” said Dane Kennedy, a professor emeritus of history and international affairs who took part in antiwar protests at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s.
“I applaud the D.C. police for refusing to intervene,” he said. “By the same token, I’m appalled and embarrassed that GW’s administration has expelled peaceful student protesters. It sends a really shameful message about its disdain for students’ rights.”
“I think the D.C. police were right to refuse to arrest peaceful protesters,” said Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies and international affairs at GWU. “But even militant chants and radical signs have First Amendment protection. The D.C. police seem to know that.”
It’s a bizarre, Freaky Friday twist here in D.C., where the educators are punishing students for speaking out and the cops are saying they are on board with supporting “peaceful first amendment activities through the District of Columbia,” according to their statement.
Well, sometimes.
I have been covering protests here in D.C. for almost 25 years, and in that time I have been tear-gassed, hit with a rubber bullet (a nasty thing the size of a marshmallow that I keep on a cake plate in my credenza), shoved, pushed and yelled at. I have covered lawsuits and news conferences where police got it wrong, interviewed protesters who were roughly and wrongly arrested, and bore witness to an insurrection that ran roughshod over a force that was wildly unprepared.
But it’s a near-daily experience in the nation’s capital that Americans come here to air their grievances and assemble, and the police manage all of it well.
“Over the years, we have developed strategies and expertise in policing First Amendment activities,” D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said in a statement. “We support peaceful protests, and I rely on the Metropolitan Police Department and their experience and expertise to decide what types of interventions are necessary.”
There is an art to policing demonstrations, a balancing act weighing when to let small things go and when to crack down. And experienced cops know that their overreaction can embolden a crowd.
It’s something Dana Fisher calls “moral shock.”
Fisher is a sociologist at American University who studies activism, and she has seen the pattern in other movements, especially during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which became the largest movement in U.S. history, fueled by footage of George Floyd’s death at the hands of several police officers.
“The moral shock was so strong that it motivated numerous political and social movement organizations that were focused on other issues to call for their members to join the protests in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement,” Fisher wrote in her recent book,
She expects the same is happening today, and those joining the campus demonstrations now, while they may have some feelings about Gaza, saw footage of campus arrests by squads in riot gear and are getting out there to support the protesters’ First Amendment freedoms.
That’s the vibe I got from many of the faculty members who have been speaking out.
“Like so many revered activists of the past, they are peacefully demanding an end to rank, heartbreaking injustice,” said Thomas Guglielmo, chair and professor of George Washington University’s American Studies department and another faculty member who signed the protest letter.
“I also signed on because I want my university leadership to stop denouncing and punishing and suspending students for their peaceful assembly, speech, and dissent and instead to meet with them to find a way forward,” he said. “There is no other way.”
Comments