Justin Ling is a freelance journalist who writes the newsletter Bug-eyed and Shameless. He is writing a book on police crowd control tactics.
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On May 1, in New York City, Columbia University professors demonstrate outside Columbia University's campus to demand the release of students. CHARLY TRIBALLEU/Getty Images
On Tuesday night, New York City Police Department officers stormed Columbia University and arrested students who had taken over the campus. The mass arrest of students demanding that their school be divested from companies supplying the Israeli military occurred 56 years ago to the day police arrested hundreds of anti-Vietnam War protesters on the same campus. This is history repeating itself in how we behave as a broader society. , few lessons have been learned since then.
Here in Canada, McGill University has chosen similar tactics to deal with its own pro-Palestinian camp. The school has asked Montreal police to break up the protest, citing “overt anti-Semitic language and intimidating behavior,” but police have so far refused. “No crime was committed,” he said.
A Quebec Superior Court judge on Wednesday rejected an injunction brought by two McGill University students, ruling that it violated the right of other students to “peacefully assemble.”
We should hope it stays this way. Police intervention is a big mistake, and it's just as wrong today as it was half a century ago.
Back in 1968, when demonstrators waved Viet Cong flags and shouted “Kill the cops!” university administrators and politicians justified police repression in a variety of ways. They claimed that communist infiltrators and professional radicals used anti-war protests and the civil rights movement to destabilize the nation. These warnings, aired in Congress and published in nearly every major newspaper, turned out to be fiction. Yet they justified heavy-handed repression in places like Chicago and Columbia, which we look back on with horror today.
Max Frankel, then a New York Times journalist, expressed this sentiment perfectly in 1968 when he said: Old people deplore the ferocity of young people and are tempted to use violence to suppress them. ”
Despite this apparent regret, we continue to professionalize the repression of demonstrators when we want to restore order, but we often see that this only fosters further chaos.
Remember the protests in Montreal in 2012? The picketing students were tear gassed, beaten with clubs, and arrested. Or the protests during the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010, where police engaged in kettles and mass detentions, mostly without charges. Or during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, instead of preventing violence and riots, police consistently escalated further violence and unrest. And now warnings against Soviet agents have been replaced by fear of “outside agitators,” in the words of New York Mayor Eric Adams.
Of course, there is a time and a place for police work. For example, when an entire city is occupied by tractor trailers for several weeks. But it's time to stop trying to solve social problems by donning riot gear.
I spent time at Columbia University last week. I spoke to students, some of whom were Jewish students who had participated in pro-Palestinian camps, who said they felt the university was overreacting. They feared police violence more than violence from their classmates.
In fact, Colombian authorities asked police to break up the camp on its second day, prompting more students to join the protests. The university's attempts to forcibly expel students are met with further insubordination at every step. The situation reached a climax on Tuesday night when hundreds of police in riot gear rushed in to make arrests. The administration is currently asking police officers to remain on duty for the next two weeks. If they agree, they will occupy the campus to prevent students from occupying it.
This is despicable for higher education institutions, which should be sandboxes where students can develop their political selves without such amateurish interference from the outside world.
This is not to say that concerns about anti-Semitism among pro-Palestinian protesters are not legitimate. They absolutely are. Last month, images of protesters marching in front of Parliament House in Ottawa chanting “Hail October 7th!” went viral. Mr McGill was captured on camera yelling at a Jewish student to “go back to Poland”.
This rhetoric is grotesque. But it's not violence. Those who are caught actually inciting violence or committing assault should obviously be arrested and prosecuted. Unfortunately, universities, including McGill University, have cited some of these examples to justify large-scale repression.
Universities are better off simply doing nothing. Make the student encampment work on that quad and ignore the students.
However, there are other options as well. Some universities, such as Brown University and Northwestern University, have chosen to comply with the protesters' demands. Others are still in negotiation. Those who choose dialogue rather than confrontation generally find their campuses more peaceful.
Calling the police will only make things worse. It's still the worst solution.
