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Police have arrested more than 2,100 people during pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses across the United States in recent weeks, sometimes using riot gear, tactical vehicles, and flash-bang devices to clear tent encampments and occupied buildings.
One officer accidentally discharged his gun inside a Columbia University administration building while clearing out protesters camped inside, authorities disclosed Thursday.
No one was injured by the officer’s mistake late Tuesday inside Hamilton Hall on the Columbia campus, the New York Police Department said on Thursday. He was trying to use the flashlight attached to his gun at the time and instead fired a single round that struck a frame on the wall.
There were other officers but no students in the immediate vicinity, officials said. Body camera footage shows when the officer’s gun went off, but the district attorney’s office is conducting a review, a standard practice.
More than 100 people were taken into custody during the Columbia crackdown, just a fraction of the total arrests stemming from recent campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. A tally by The Associated Press on Thursday found at least 50 incidents of arrests at 40 different US colleges or universities since April 18.
Early Thursday, officers surged against a crowd of demonstrators at the University of California, Los Angeles, ultimately taking at least 200 protesters into custody after hundreds defied orders to leave, some forming human chains as police fired flash bangs to break up the crowds. Police tore apart a fortified encampment’s barricade of plywood, pallets, metal fences, and dumpsters, then pulled down canopies and tents.
Like at UCLA, tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across other campuses nationwide in a student movement unlike any other this century. Iranian state television carried live images of the police action at UCLA, as did Qatar’s pan-Arab Al Jazeera satellite network.
