NEW YORK: New York City Mayor Eric Adams and top police officials persistently maintained that there was no violence, and no reports of injury in relation to pro-Palestine student protest arrests in Columbia University, last month.
However, medical records, pictures circulated by protesters, and interviews revealed that at least nine out of the 46 students arrested inside Hamilton Hall after it was barricaded on April 30 had more than minor injuries like scratches and bruises. Some of the documented injuries include a fractured eye socket, concussions, an ankle sprain, cuts and injured wrists & hands resulting from tight plastic flexicuffs.
All the 46 demonstrators who were arrested within Hamilton were charged with third-degree trespassing as a misdemeanor. The action followed Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s decision to call police several hours into the occupation at the student-led protest hub that is now emerging in college campuses globally. Other university authorities nationwide have also brought in law enforcement officers to quash such anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian camps.
Reuters provided details about these injuries and interviews with the mayor’s office for New York Police Department (NYPD), and Columbia University. None challenged that there had been some injuries. NYPD said its officers behaved professionally while in office.
Time-stamped hospital records indicate that at least three injured protestors arrested inside Hamilton were taken by police to hospitals even as they remained under arrest on that night.
Some other protestors whose demands are focused on divesting arms manufacturing corporations as well as other companies supporting Israel’s government were seen by volunteer doctors who give assistance to individuals detained by cops immediately after leaving custody on May 2nd.A few then went to clinics for medical aid.
“I was slammed downward to the ground”I turned my head around checking whether any colleague needed help when a policeman kicked me right into my eyes causing sharp ringing of ears interrupted,” recalled Christopher Holmes, aged twenty-five years who is studying for a Masters degree at Columbia affiliated Union Theological Seminary. Holmes said that an officer then slammed his left forehead to the floor of Hamilton Hall, moments later.
Days after release, he was taken by a friend to a Manhattan hospital with the swollen eye. According to the hospital records, his eye was concussed and his eye socket was fractured.
‘We are unarmed.’
According to Kayla Mamelak, who is a spokesperson for Mayor Adams, it cannot be stated when exactly he got to know that protesters were injured first. At a press conference held on May 1st in which Adams accompanied police leaders, he said that arrests had been organized and calm with no injuries being recorded.
In an email Mamelak wrote that the arrests which were conducted by hundreds of armed riot police officers were “a complex operation” carried out “professionally and respectfully”.
The person from the police department who answered our questions refused to disclose their name in an email also did not deny the fact protesters had injuries but simply told us there was swift response professionally and effectively by their officers.
Both spokespeople refused to show unedited videos filmed using body-worn cameras of some officers during the arrest or injury reports including use-of-force from these episodes. That night, students were forced into dormitories whereas journalists were made to leave campus off.
When reached out for comment about this story on May 10th ,Columbia University spokesman Ben Chang promised answers but didn’t send them by deadline date, nor respond to subsequent phone calls or e-mails.
While police cut through barricades of heavy furniture and bicycle chains using electric saws, some protestors said they were sitting on the floor in Hamilton’s lobby with raised hands. The police threw in a flash-bang grenade that released disorienting loud bangs and bursts of light before rushing through the doors.
Gabriel Yancy who used to work as a research assistant at a Columbia neuroscience laboratory has been fired since then; according to him, he had seen some protesters thrown on the ground by policemen; others have been stepped upon not less than three people have kicked neither one woman nor any more guys in her chest.
Police “getting on top of people, throwing people,” said Aidan Parisi, 27-year-old student in Columbia’s social work department. “We are unarmed!” several demonstrators shouted.
Several students said that officers forced their knees onto their backs. New York City made knee restraints that compress the diaphragm unlawful for police use during arrests last year.
Gideon Oliver is a civil rights attorney who now represents some of the arrested students; he was involved in an agreement for reform reached between the New York State Attorney General and the New York Police Department last year which sought to end ‘a pattern of excessive force’ against demonstrators.
Oliver added that “Now is the time for the city and for the police department to de-escalate and to stop engaging in tactics on the streets that appear designed to chill protests.”
