Campus protests led to more than 3,100 arrests, but many charges have been dropped

As pro-Palestinian demonstrations rocked college campuses this spring with protests of the war in the Gaza Strip, many university administrators found themselves eager to quell the action however they could. Some negotiated with the demonstrators. Many sent in the police.

When Columbia University called in police in April to break up an encampment, it was the first major detainment of protesters. Since then, more than 3,100 people have been arrested or detained on campuses nationwide.

Most were charged with trespassing or disturbing the peace. Some face more serious charges, including resisting arrest.

But in the months since, many of the charges have been dropped, even as some students are facing additional consequences, including being barred from their campuses or having their diplomas withheld.

Delia Garza, the prosecutor in Travis County who dropped criminal trespassing charges against more than 100 people arrested at the University of Texas at Austin, said that such charges were rarely a priority for prosecutors, since they are minor and nonviolent offenses. Garza, a Democrat, said she also calculated that jurors in her community would likely determine that students protesting on their own campus were simply exercising First Amendment rights.

At some universities, the decision to drop the charges was met with disappointment. “Actions that violate laws and institutional rules should be met with consequences,” said Mike Rosen, spokesperson for the University of Texas at Austin.

Many charges were also dropped among the thousands of people who were arrested in the racial justice protests of 2020, with some prosecutors saying they would focus only on defendants who were caught destroying property or looting, not those who were merely demonstrating.

“The goal isn’t to punish people,” said Hermann Walz, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor and who teaches criminal law at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “It’s to clear the streets.”

According to data collected by The New York Times, protesters were detained this year at more than 70 schools in at least 30 states — from Arizona State University, with its 80,000 students, to the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, with a student body of under 4,000.

Historians who study student movements say the United States hasn’t seen such a large number of people arrested in campus protests in 50 years. While millions of students participated in protests against the Vietnam War, there were about 4,000 arrests at campus protests in the spring of 1969, during the most intense period of activity.

The pro-Palestinian activism “is a relatively small movement,” said Robert Cohen, a historian at New York University, “but the arrests are almost comparable to the height of the Vietnam protests.”

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