Across the street from the protest I was attending outside the state capitol building in Austin, Texas, two police cars idled, red and blue lights flashing but sirens silent. The police seemed more bored than annoyed. It was the early 2000s, and I had just moved from Turkey to study at the University of Texas.
My fellow protesters were furious. “This is a police state!” they began chanting.
I turned around, confused. Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of her 1980 coup. For years, protests have been suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even the slightest disruption could put Istanbul on lockdown, with armored vehicles blocking major roads. Trust me, I said, this is not what a police state looks like.
When I told a friend back home that Americans think it's outrageous that the police would even do something like this, appear At the demo, It was considered further evidence that I had been recruited by the CIA.
“American police showed up at protests, there is nothing? ” one of my friends scoffed. “Did you just look? No arrests? Did you ever bump heads?” Yeah, that's right.
Twenty years have passed since then, and American protests have changed somewhat. America's response to them has changed significantly.
Many observers point to September 11th as the turning point when American police began to resemble the military, but in reality it was the Iraq War. The conflict accelerated a policy that allowed police to obtain surplus military equipment for free. More than 8,000 local police departments acquired $7 billion worth of heavy equipment, including mine-resistant armored vehicles used in conventional combat, tactical equipment, grenade launchers, weaponized aircraft, and assault rifles.
Why do places like Preston, Idaho (population 6,000) and Dundee, Michigan (population 8,000) need armored vehicles designed to withstand mines?
If you get it, there's a good chance you'll be able to use it. These days, police officers are far less likely to sit in their cars and monitor protests from a distance.
I remained in academia and made political resistance around the world one of my main areas of research. Above all, the lesson I learned is that disproportionate repression is often the most powerful accelerant of protest movements.
I saw this on Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Then, footage of trapped women being pepper-sprayed at close range turned a little-known demonstration into an idea that spread across the country. What I saw in Istanbul's Gezi Park in 2013 was when people trying to save the park from demolition were tear gassed and arrested, and a small encampment was burned. It helped spark protests that rocked the country. I saw this in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. At that time, police arrived in grieving neighborhoods with armored vehicles and sniper rifles, sparking riots and inciting a national movement. And think about what photos of police officers pointing dogs and hoses at peaceful marchers did to the civil rights movement.
The United States is now at a new tipping point. University administrators, some students, parents, trustees, donors and elected officials across the country are frustrated by protests over the war in Gaza. That's not surprising. The protests are meant to be destructive. Will those in authority rise to the moment and meet this challenge with the seasoned leadership that higher education institutions deserve? Or will we panic and crack down out of proportion to the actual threat?
I'm not feeling well at the moment. Riot rioters carrying M4 carbines (the type of weapon used in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan) at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to disperse what many onlookers described as small and peaceful. State troopers in military gear and chemical gas launchers were called out. A group with several tents. “When I lived on campus, none of these people showed up, and while I hid my three children, white supremacists held tiki torches and said, “Jews will replace us.'' “We marched across campus shouting, 'This is not going to happen,'” Chad Wellmon said. university associate professorhe wrote on social media.
In Dartmouth, police in riot gear were called out within hours of the encampment forming. In the ensuing confrontation, they grabbed Anneliese Orlek, a 65-year-old historian and former Jewish studies chair, threw her to the ground and arrested her. She was briefly banned from the campus where she had taught for 34 years until the Dartmouth community spoke out. She still faces charges of trespassing.
At the University of Texas at Austin, police officers in riot gear marched through the campus on horseback like cavalry going to war. At Indiana University, state police snipers were stationed on the roofs of campus buildings. Similar incidents are occurring one after another on campus, including pre-dawn attacks on sleeping students. A police officer opened fire at Columbia University. The NYPD said it was an accident and fortunately no one was hurt, but it's not a comforting development.
It's the worst, and it's getting worse. The ferocity of the repression exceeds the threat to the public interest that the garrisons are accused of posing. This is a violation of long-standing social contracts about how campuses deal with demonstrations, and a direct contradiction to the loving way many universities currently portray campus activities over the past few decades.
It may be hard to believe, but without the fanfare, these protests might not have been an anomaly but, for better or worse, an event in college life. Just last year, students at the University of California, Berkeley brought tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses and occupied a library scheduled to close for nearly three months. Congress saw no need to hold hearings on it. In 2019, Johns Hopkins University students occupied the building for five weeks to protest the university's contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its push for civilian police. Four students were arrested, but authorities soon announced that the charges would be dropped. why? Perhaps it's the same reason that Albany, Georgia, police chief Laurie Pritchett secretly arranged for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to be released from the city's jail, against King's wishes. He knew the commotion would die down and the protests would spread to the next city.
I learned the usefulness of this approach while studying abroad in Texas. When University of Texas students, first a few dozen and eventually about 200, occupied the administration building overnight to protest the end of affirmative action in the state, the school's administration It branched out, a series of town halls to discuss the issue. This offer was only valid if the students left the building, which they did.
This was a de-escalation strategy that doubled as an educational experience. The discussions, sometimes paid, generated ideas that could help the university expand its strategies to maintain racial diversity. These strategies have enabled the university to achieve better results than many peer institutions.
I hear many people say that the current protests are going too far in considering such virtues.
When members of the university community feel threatened, it is a serious matter. Anti-Semitism is real (as is racism against Muslims and Arabs), and some of the protesters' tactics, such as blocking others from passing, clearly cross the line. . Certainly, students who are found to be making any kind of threat should receive their due retribution. But the solution to such problems does not come from wearing riot gear.
In reality, protests have always been chaotic, sometimes interspersed with eloquent pleas and impassioned testimonies, as well as incoherent or offensive messages. The 1968 anti-war demonstrators may be admired now, but back then many onlookers were horrified as they heard choruses of support for Ho Chi Minh's military victory. During the Iraq war, I attended demonstrations where fringe political groups managed to participate and rolled my eyes at their wild slogans and insane manifestos.
There's a lot of that happening here as well. I’m no longer a wide-eyed graduate student. I'm well into the step in my career where I get off the lawn (and until recently, my office overlooked the lawn where Colombian protesters pitched their tents). I often feel like getting angry at these students, too. Why this slogan, why this banner, why not something with broader appeal? But overall, I've been impressed by the sincerity of the protesters I've talked to.
The tough countermeasures of recent weeks are having the opposite effect, judging by the number of new encampments popping up across the country. But more than that, they are dangerous. Such an overreaction could lead to the collapse of society on both sides of the barricades.
Hong Kong's 2014 pro-democracy movement was a textbook non-violent mass protest, with organizers even naming their group “Occupy the Heartland with Love and Peace.” Their movement was crushed, and many organizers were sentenced to long prison terms or forced into exile. I participated in the second protest in 2019. The new leaders were very young and very enthusiastic. But as police continued to use rubber bullets and tear gas, a small portion of the protesters stopped talking about love and peace and started making petrol bombs.
We can see where all this is happening with the shockingly violent attack at UCLA, where a pro-Israel mob charged toward people encamped with sticks, chemical spray, and fireworks. (The university and law enforcement did not intervene for hours.) And these dangerous dynamics can extend beyond campus. A New York man was charged with assault on Wednesday after he allegedly drove his car into a crowd of people holding placards and chanting chants.
Overreacting is dangerous in other ways as well.
The University of Florida has announced that students who commit violations such as “littering,” assembling “chairs,” and placing “unmanned signs” will be suspended from campus (and staff members will be fired). I have a vague suspicion that it applies to undergrads napping under a tree or tailgating to a football game. Rather, I think the purpose is to prevent protests that the government dislikes. What kind of precedent is that? The first shot fired at the campus protest was an accident. I'm worried there might not be a next time.
Authoritarian leaders around the world are paying attention to these trends. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a statement condemning the US treatment of “conscientious students and scholars, including anti-Zionist Jews, at some prestigious American universities.” At first I didn't know how to react. But in the end, we had to admit that the comparison to a police state was not as outrageous as it once seemed.
