Following a nine-hour standoff, law enforcement officers clad in riot gear breached and dismantled a pro-Palestine encampment at UCLA early Thursday, bringing an end to the week-long protest and taking “hundreds” of protesters into custody.
Led by the California Highway Patrol, officers advanced on the encampment around 2:45 a.m. Thursday, initially encountering heavy resistance from protesters and their supporters near the western side of Royce Hall. Officers had greater success on the eastern side, where they moved through a makeshift blockade of trash bins and reached the perimeter of the camp, allowing them to tear away metal barricades and plywood planks that encircled the area.
Once the perimeter was breached, officers slowly began detaining protesters and leading them away. Officers deployed seemingly dozens of flash- bang devices as they worked to penetrate deeper into the encampment, pulling out tents one by one. People inside the encampment wrote on social media that officers fired less-than-lethal projectiles at them.
By about 4 a.m., officers had largely dismantled the eastern front of the encampment. Hundreds of protesters, however, remained steadfast and formed a line with their arms linked, facing off with an equally long line of officers.
Officers then turned their attention to the area immediately in front of Royce Hall, where some protesters could be seen throwing what appeared to be water and other objects at the officers. By 4:45 a.m., however, police had successfully cleared the area, giving them control lines on both the northern and eastern flanks of the encampment.
Once the northern flank in front of Royce Hall had been secured, the fight was essentially over, as police squeezed in on the encampment, removing more tents and pushing protesters deeper into the camp.
At that point, some people from the encampment began to leave the area voluntarily. Many grabbed their tents and other possessions and simply walked away to the west, where no police lines were established.
But a substantial number of protesters stayed behind, apparently resigning themselves to being arrested in the name of their cause. Police methodically began detaining protesters one at a time, using zip-ties to secure their hands behind their backs then walking them out of the area to be processed and eventually loaded into sheriff’s department buses.
CHP Officer Alec Pereyda told reporters around 6 a.m. that the number was in the “hundreds.”
There was no immediate word on any injuries to officers or protesters suffered during the operation.
One protester who said he was a graduate student at UCLA told ABC7 as he was led out of the encampment by police that he had been in the protest since it began last week. He said he was proud that the protest gained national attention and raised awareness of the situation in Palestine. He also said he was glad to see the number of supporters who came to the campus Thursday morning.
At daybreak Thursday, although the encampment had been cleared, some pockets of protesters remained on the campus, including a small group standing just west of the quad that had housed the camp. A line of officers stood watch over the group, and it was unclear if those people might also be subject to arrest.
The clearing of the encampment, however, gave a broader picture of the amount of damage done to the campus. The front of Royce Hall and Powell Library suffered extensive graffiti damage, some of it profane. An extensive amount of garbage also remained behind in the area.
The law enforcement offensive began roughly nine hours after dispersal orders were formally issued around 6 p.m. Wednesday. The announcement was rebroadcast every 30 minutes into the evening hours, but there was no sign of movement from any of the protesters.
As those announcements continued, law enforcement ranks on the campus swelled into the hundreds as the evening wore on. The Los Angeles Police Department went on a citywide tactical alert, keeping all officers on duty beyond their shifts. LAPD officers — along with Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, campus police and California Highway Patrol officers — were deployed either directly to the campus or to the nearby West Los Angeles federal building, where multiple mobile-command vehicles were stationed, along with at least a half-dozen sheriff’s inmate-transport buses.
Protest organizers issued a statement early Wednesday evening calling on the community to come to the campus to help defend the encampment. Protesters said they were “ready to stand firm against an institution who would see us destroyed — the very institution that claims to care for `student safety’ and the very institution that encouraged last night’s Zionist assault” — referencing a late-Tuesday assault on the camp.
Perhaps in response to that call, hundreds — if not thousands — of protest supporters gathered on the outskirts of the encampment Wednesday night, some of them locking arms in an effort to block law enforcement from approaching the protesters.
Law enforcement remained patient into the early morning hours, appearing content to wait out the crowd, but the numbers only appeared to swell as the night went on.
Shortly after 2 a.m., bus loads of additional CHP officers were brought onto the campus and they launched their offensive a short time later.
As the initial assault progressed, the campus looked and sounded more like a war zone, with police continuing to fire flash-bang devices and smoke rising into the air. Reports from the scene indicated that some protesters sprayed officers with fire extinguishers. Protesters also bright flashlights and strobe lights, shining them into the eyes of approaching officers.
It was unknown how many protesters were inside the encampment walls, although some reports from the scene had put the number at more than 1,000. The number of tents in the camp had grown to more than 100 over the past week. It was also unknown how many of the protesters were actually UCLA students or affiliated with the university.
UCLA officials notified protesters on Tuesday that the encampment had been deemed an unlawful assembly, and any students remaining inside could face discipline ranging up to expulsion, while university staffers could face termination and people unaffiliated with UCLA could face misdemeanor criminal charges.
Despite those warnings, the encampment remained intact, even after several violent hours late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, when a group of counter-protesters attacked the camp with fireworks and reportedly deployed pepper spray and bear repellent. Protest organizers said more than a dozen people were injured, most from exposure to the chemical agents.
Classes were canceled at the university on Wednesday following the violence the night before, and possibly in anticipation of police action against the encampment.
All classes on Thursday and Friday will be held remotely, with university officials saying operations at the Westwood campus would be “limited.” All campus employees were “encouraged to work remotely wherever possible.”
Although the police activity Thursday morning brought the weeklong encampment to an end, questions about the university’s response to the protest activities remain.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and other elected officials on Wednesday called for investigations into the university and police response to the violent attack on the encampment launched by counter-protesters Tuesday night. That attack was allowed to rage for several hours with little to no police intervention, until officers in riot gear finally moved in around 3 a.m. and restored order.
In a message to the UCLA community Wednesday afternoon, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block called the overnight clashes the result of “instigators” who came to the campus to “forcefully attack the encampment.”
“However one feels about the encampment, this attack on our students, faculty and community members was utterly unacceptable,” Block said. “It has shaken our campus to its core and — adding to other abhorrent incidents that we have witnessed and that have circulated on social media over the past several days — further damaged our community’s sense of security.”
He added: “We are still gathering information about the attack on the encampment (Tuesday) night, and I can assure you that we will conduct a thorough investigation that may lead to arrests, expulsions and dismissals. We are also carefully examining our own security processes in light of recent events. … This is a dark chapter in our campus’ history. We will restore a safe learning environment at UCLA.”
But Newsom’s office called the “limited and delayed campus law enforcement response … unacceptable.”
University of California President Michael V. Drake issued a statement Wednesday saying he has “requested a detailed accounting from the campus about what transpired in the early morning hours today (Wednesday).”
“But some confusion remains. Therefore, we are also ordering an independent external review of both UCLA’s planning and actions, and the effectiveness of the mutual aid response. Such a review will help us address many immediate questions but also help guide us in possible future events.”
The UC Board of Regents has scheduled a special closed-door meeting for Friday to discuss campus encampments and the university system’s response.
Mayor Karen Bass, who cut short a lobbying trip to Washington D.C. to return to Los Angeles in response to the overnight violence, said Wednesday there must be “a full investigation into what occurred on campus (Tuesday night). Those involved in launching fireworks at other people, spraying chemicals and physically assaulting others will be found, arrested, and prosecuted, as well as anyone involved in any form of violence or lawlessness.”
In response to the criticism of the police response to the violence, the Federated University Police Officers’ Association issued a statement on behalf of officers at the 10 police departments in the UC system. The association insisted that decisions about police response to campus violence “rest firmly in the hands of campus leadership.”
“They shoulder the accountability for the outcomes stemming from these decisions, not the UC Police Department,” according to the group. “.The campus leadership, not law enforcement, owns the results of their decisions.”
Organizers of the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment, similar to their counterparts at USC, had issued a list of demands last week calling for divestment of all University of California and UCLA Foundation funds from companies tied to Israel, along with a demand that the university call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and begin an academic boycott against Israeli universities, including a suspension of study-abroad programs.
The UC issued a statement in response noting that the university has “consistently opposed calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel. While the university affirms the right of our community members to express diverse viewpoints, a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses.
“UC tuition and fees are the primary funding sources for the University’s core operations. None of these funds are used for investment purposes,” the statement continued.
Block, who is stepping down as chancellor at the end of July, is expected to testify before Congress on May 23 about the campus’ response to antisemitism and actions to protect Jewish students.