In the tumultuous three weeks following the eruption of protests at U.S. universities, law enforcement has descended upon dozens of campuses, engaging in mass arrests of students. This approach, deemed outdated and counterproductive by many criminologists, has raised concerns. For instance, in New York, nearly 300 individuals were arrested at Columbia University and City College of New York on April 30 during protests related to the conflict in Gaza. The police used stun grenades to disorient the demonstrators. Similarly, in Los Angeles, over 200 people were arrested at UCLA just two nights later.
Mass arrests have also been reported at schools in Connecticut, Georgia, Texas, New Hampshire, and elsewhere. Experts caution against drawing premature conclusions about each police intervention, emphasizing that it is too early to assess whether police actions have been hasty. However, an initial analysis of the police response to these protests indicates that, in many instances, law enforcement has not yet abandoned outdated tactics for managing large demonstrations. They argue that many departments have been slow to implement lessons learned from the racial justice protests of 2020, which resulted in several costly legal settlements due to police misconduct.
"We don't want a large number of low-quality arrests. We want a small number of high-quality arrests," said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University.
This report by Reuters is based on interviews with ten experts in criminology, law enforcement, civil liberties, and law, as well as a review of recent research. Since the first mass arrests at Columbia on April 18, at least 2,600 demonstrators have been detained at over 100 protests in 39 states and Washington, D.C., according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization. Most of the charges are for trespassing, with some individuals also charged with assaulting a police officer. In New York, suspects have also been charged with criminal mischief and burglary.
Some prosecutors are dismissing cases. Following a police intervention at the University of Texas at Austin on April 25, where officers on horseback and in riot gear were involved, Travis County prosecutors dismissed charges against 57 people, citing a lack of probable cause.
Criminologists argue that many mass arrest cases are dismissed because the police use broad, general statements, sometimes identical, to charge large groups of suspects. Such arrests are also prone to sweeping up bystanders or individuals charged with minor offenses like trespassing. They can also backfire by escalating tensions and generating hostility toward the police, giving protesters a rallying point for even more vigorous protests, experts say.
Columbia University, which called in the police twice, did not respond to a request for comment. However, Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a statement on April 18 that she had requested the police to dismantle the day-old student encampment because it violated numerous rules, aiming to ensure campus safety.
New York police did not respond to a request for comment. However, during a press conference following the April 30 operation, Police Commissioner Edward Caban stated, "The situation on their campuses had deteriorated to a point where the safety of their students, faculty, staff, and the public was at risk."
The Los Angeles Police Department referred inquiries to UCLA officials, who did not respond. Much of the current thinking on policing protests has been influenced by the 2020 demonstrations following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked global protests against police brutality and racism.
A 2022 paper by the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington that analyzed the law enforcement response in 2020 recommended avoiding mass arrests whenever possible and limiting the use of "less-lethal" munitions such as tear gas and rubber bullets. It also suggested that the police should engage more with protesters, prioritize establishing trust and communication, and avoid a show of force, such as deploying riot gear, unless absolutely necessary.
Another 2022 report by the National Policing Institute emphasized the importance of empathetic communication with protest leaders, the use of modern crowd psychology research, and the restriction of force to "specific individuals and groups committing criminal offenses, not entire groups of demonstrators."
In Denver, Police Chief Ron Thomas told a Citizen Oversight Board that he refused a campus request to dismantle a protest encampment for a second time on April 26 after the first raid resulted in 45 arrests. He stated that he would resist future attempts to break up the encampment unless there was clear evidence of unlawful behavior.
Clifford Stott, director of the Keele Policing Academic Collaboration at Keele University in Britain, is collaborating with police in Columbus, Ohio, on a project funded by the U.S. Justice Department to apply modern research to crowd control and protests, as recommended in the 2022 reports.
Stott said that while some police forces have adopted the latest research, many are still following a doctrine from the 1960s and 1970s that emphasizes the use of force and dispersing crowds rather than mediation.
"When policing relies on the use of force, especially indiscriminate force against crowds as a whole, we see a psychological change, and we see escalation resulting from that psychological change," Stott said.
As a result, protests that initially focused on the situation in Gaza began to include demands for free speech, according to Stott. Several experts believe that Columbia University's decision to call in the police to dismantle a student encampment on April 18, which resulted in 93 arrests, contributed to the increasingly contentious protests at Columbia and other campuses.
Maguire said his research would investigate whether Columbia's decision escalated events elsewhere. Stott said he believed other researchers would do the same, adding that it was too early to determine whether Columbia or the protesters had escalated the confrontations.