We arrested student protestors. Now what?

I should warn you that this is a post filled with questions and offering few answers. Think of this as a post about one very fundamental question.

Now what?

In my last post I wrote about how arresting students does not make me feel any better about the safety of my Jewish children on their college campuses - in fact, quite the opposite. Since then, there have only been more arrests. As of this writing an estimated 2400 students and dozens of professors have been arrested on campuses across the country. There have been more violent clashes involving protestors, counter protestors, and police. Graduation ceremonies have been canceled, students expelled, and some even threatened with eviction from their campus housing. It feels absolutely impossible to know what to do or how to bring the temperature down. But one thing is crystal clear to me: the path forward cannot be lined with armed police officers in riot gear. We can’t arrest our way out of the current situation. But now that we have made police response protest a fact of life on many campuses we must ask ourselves: what have we unleashed?

I am deeply concerned about the use of police to squash campus protests. I believe that campuses should be a place where the default response is debate and deeper learning. I know we need to have some hard conversations about how we define hate speech and determine when protest crosses a line into danger, but I worry that too many universities missed opportunities for student engagement and went right to student arrests. I was particularly disheartened to see a disturbing video of state police in riot gear approaching a group of student protestors at my alma mater, Penn. Shortly after, students were arrested at the university my son attends. I just don’t think this is the path to safety or stopping antisemitism. Bringing armed police officers on to college campuses does not make my Jewish college students safer. It doesn’t make any college students safer - particularly students of color. And it certainly doesn’t make our democracy safer.

So the burning question - now what? What is the long game here? The end of the semester may quiet things down somewhat, but we all know the summer is short and who’s to say what strife we will face when students return for the fall. Do we think that police will - or should - be brought in to clear future protests and encampments? Will they only be called for actions related to certain topics and not others? Some may say that law enforcement should be called only when there is hate speech or when students feel unsafe. Even within the Jewish community we don’t have a shared definition of antisemitism. So how does that get negotiated? Whose safety is valued and attended to, and how do we define unsafe vs. uncomfortable?

There are multiple issues to consider, starting with whether police should be called in at all. But we also need to recognize that how the police respond can very much depend on who is making that call for help. Just a few days ago, the Washington Post reported on the differential response of law enforcement to conflict at UCLA. When counter protestors attacked pro-Palestinian protestors on April 30th, law enforcement agencies did not step in to stop the violence until 3 hours and 34 minutes after the first 911 call. This delay allowed for the continuation of a very violent incident on campus. According to their report: “Law enforcement’s tepid response on April 30 contrasts starkly with their aggressive maneuvers the following night, when officers in riot gear, some firing projectiles, swiftly dismantled the UCLA camp and arrested 210 people for refusing to leave.” This under- vs over-policing raises even more questions about the efficacy and safety of relying on police responses to protest - who gets to be seen as deserving of police protection?

And while I truly hope that carceral responses will not become the norm on college campuses, I must ask a difficult and painful question. One that as a Jew I feel even more compelled to ask. What are the implications of NOT sending the police to every protest, when university administrators were so willing to send them to quell protests about Gaza? Sit ins, encampments, and die ins have long been a method of demonstration and public awareness - will all such actions be met with forceful dismantling? I know I am going to get pushback here, because there are many who equate the very act of protesting against Israel’s actions with antisemitism. I do not, though I am certainly concerned about the rise of antisemitism in this country. I know there has been a lot of concern about violence at the protests, and that violence has been used to justify the need for law enforcement. But as a recent article in the Guardian reported, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled) found that most campus protests did not result in interpersonal violence or property damage (fewer than 20). But in the same time period, there were at least 70 instances of forceful police intervention against these protests.

There will be those who say police were called because the language used at protests was inherently antisemitic and threatening against Jews. There is a very complex and difficult conversation to be had in the Jewish community about how we define antisemitism. But I pose this question: if we are to use the logic that threatening or hateful speech should trigger a police response, where were the police when a young white man at Ole Miss made monkey noises and gestures at a Black protestor? Will we only see police responses to certain kinds of protest, certain disruptive actions (and isn’t the nature of protest to be disruptive?), and certain kinds of hateful speech?

Who gets to feel safe on college campuses?

I don’t have easy answers to any of these questions, but I do feel they are questions that need to be asked. I truly hope that the end of the semester will be bring some space and time for us to dig deep and have hard conversations about these past weeks. To think together about how we respond to protest without putting students at risk of being harmed (or G-d forbid shot) by police. And to talk about what safety looks like for all of our students, whether they are impacted by antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and/or other forms of hate.

I also think we need some time to consider the impact of widespread arrests of college students on our democracy. I do not think we have even begun to unpack this.

I will say this, shout this from the rooftops. Our safety is in our solidarity, which requires us (me) to speak up when we (I) see differential responses to hate. My Jewish soul necessitates this.