Police advised to avoid mass arrests; then came the U.S. campus protests
In the three tumultuous weeks since protests broke out at U.S. universities, police have descended on dozens of campuses to sweep up students in mass arrests, adhering to an approach many criminologists have found to be outdated and counterproductive.
New York police arrested nearly 300 people at Columbia University and City College of New York on April 30 during protests over the war in Gaza, setting off flash bangs to stun and disorient demonstrators. Two nights later in Los Angeles, police collared more than 200 people at UCLA.
At schools in Connecticut, Georgia, Texas, New Hampshire and elsewhere, protesters have been arrested by the dozens.
Experts on policing caution against drawing conclusions about each police intervention, saying it is too soon determine where police may have acted precipitously. That research can take years.
But an early examination of the approach to campus protests suggests police, in many cases, have yet to shed outdated ways of handling large demonstrations, they said. They added that too many departments have been slow to fully realize lessons from the 2020 racial justice protests, when police misconduct toward demonstrators resulted in several multimillion-dollar legal settlements.
“What we don’t want is a large number of low-quality arrests. We want a small number of high-quality arrests,” said Edward Maguire, a criminology professor at Arizona State University.
Reuters based this report on interviews with 10 experts in criminology, policing, civil liberties and law in addition to reviewing recent research.
Since the first mass arrests at Columbia on April 18, at least 2,600 demonstrators have been detained at more than 100 protests in 39 states and Washington, D.C., according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization. The charges are mainly trespassing, with some for assault of a police officer. New York has also accused suspects of criminal mischief and burglary.
Some prosecutors are dismissing cases. After police on horseback and clad in riot gear intervened at the University of Texas at Austin on April 25, Travis County prosecutors dropped charges against 57 people, citing a lack of probable cause.
Criminologists say many mass arrest cases are dismissed because police apply broad, general statements, sometimes in identical language, to large numbers of suspects. Such arrests are also prone to sweeping up bystanders or people charged with minor offenses such as trespassing.
They can also be counterproductive by escalating tensions and generating animus toward police, providing protesters with a rallying cry that fuels even more animated protests, experts said.
Colombia University, which twice called in police, did not respond to a request for comment but Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a statement on April 18 she requested police to clear the day-old student encampment, saying they violated numerous rules, in order to ensure campus safety.