Through a bullhorn, a young woman’s voice rang out clear and authoritative across Parker quad on the campus of the State University at New Paltz. The sky was blue. It was Thursday, May 2. The weather was warm, and the students had shed their jackets.
“How do you know if a cop is lying?” the young woman asked, waiting a beat in the silence that followed. “Their lips are moving.”
Sitting around her in the grass, the early-twenty-something crowd of about thirty sitting around her in the grass listened with upturned faces. They represented a significant portion of those students responsible for erecting a nylon tent encampment just 24 hours before on a grassy hill in a commons area bounded by dorms on three sides.
Six hours later, they would be among the 133 people zip-tied and hauled off by baton-wielding troopers of the New York State Troop F.
The president of the university, Darrell P. Wheeler, identified the encampment as “a growing threat” to the protection of the university’s academic mission and the preservation of a safe campus environment for students, faculty, staff and visitors. Wheeler expressed concern that the encampment “could become a destination for more displaced protestors who have no genuine connection to our institution.”
Protests had erupted at more than 80 college campuses in recent weeks. New York State encampments set up by students were dismantled by police, with students and some faculty members arrested at Columbia, Stony Brook, Cornell, Syracuse, Buffalo and Fordham universities and at The New School and City College in New York City.
In an email just before 10:15 p.m., Wheeler took responsibility for authorizing the state police converging onto the SUNY campus to act, indicating that others in the administration had also signed onto the decision.
“We,” he wrote, leaving the other signatories anonymous, “are now initiating removal of the encampment by police.”
“I understand that some in our community will hold me personally and solely responsible for tonight’s events,” Wheeler ended his letter. “I will have to integrate and accept that, and yet I remain steadfast in my belief that this action is necessary to protect the future of our institution and all its constituents.”
Tied off from tree trunk to tree trunk, the perimeter of the student encampment was created by stringing rope, straps and hammocks around an oval roughly 300 feet long. The area inside the ring had been declared “a liberated zone.”
Students said the encampment was in this country’s tradition of civil disobedience, and that they intended it to bring attention to their solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza living currently under persecution by the Israeli military.
Once their encampment boundaries were established, those students demanded the university sever contracts, withdraw investments, and end all financial relationships with companies they identified as responsible for what they termed as “the genocide in Palestine”. Two contracts specifically identified by students for immediate cancellation were with the German international corporation Siemens. According to reporting from the university newspaper The Oracle, Siemens is the main contractor for the EuroAsia Interconnector, an Israel-EU submarine electricity cable planned to connect Israel and its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory to Europe.
Minutes before the young woman began maligning the cops through a bullhorn, vice-president for student affairs Michael Patterson and vice-president for student well-being Kathleen Lieblich were sent out to parley with the students of the encampment.
The two brought an offer of amnesty in regard to the academic, disciplinary or legal consequences that the students might have incurred by their unauthorized annexation of the patch of university commons. They held out the promise of a dialogue with university leadership regarding the students’ demands on the condition that they dismantle their tent village by 7 p.m., roughly three hours later.
A recording of the encounter showed the students’ continued concern for what would happen if they didn’t comply.
“I understand that you’re trying to meet us where we are,” says one of the students. “It does seem, though, that there’s a gap in that, and that gap is that there’s a hidden threat if we don’t dismantle [by 7 p.m.]. We would like a ‘What if?’”
Michael Patterson said he didn’t know what that answer was.
Later in the conversation, a student tried again.
“We would like clarification on exactly what you’re threatening.”
“We’re certainly not threatening anything at this time,” Lieblich replied.
At the end of the dialogue, a young man attempted to deduce what was left unsaid and spell it out.
“You refusing to ensure to us that a police raid is something that will not happen,” he said, “is [the same] as you declaring that there is a possibility of violent escalation on behalf of the university. And I want to specify that is not our fault. That is your fault in the decision that you and administration made.”
“Well, we are waiting to hear from you guys,” responded Patterson.
“Cops can legally lie,” said the young woman with the bullhorn. “Do not believe a single thing that comes out of their mouth. They are going to try to manipulate you. They are going to try and use tactics. They are going to try to get you to take a plea deal.”
She paused and then said, “Do not take the plea deal!”
One of the students who would be arrested later gave her name as Theo. She said that when Lieblich and Patterson came back, the tents had been dismantled. But now they had brought the students a new ultimatum. Members of the encampment would have to disperse by 9 p.m.
“We asked them again,” said Theo. “What then? Still we didn’t get a clear answer.”
After the sun had set behind the Shawangunk Ridge, its choppy outline still held a glow of sunlight in the sky even while the quad was covering itself in darkness. The lampposts and the lamplight cast from inside the windows of the dorm buildings became the only sources of light other than the stars. The waspish sounds of drones hovering over the quad grew more noticeable in the darkness.
By eight o’clock about 250 people had gathered, Student spectators, members of the community, tenured professors like county legislator Megan Sperry, Protestant clergy members of varying faiths had come to witness. Students on each end of the encampment led chants with bullhorns, sang songs, and in general boosted morale in the encampment.
It was a waiting game, with intermittent spikes of exhilaration and anxiety. Rumors began to spread unconfirmed concerning the possible presence of agents provocateurs. When the word got out that 40 to 50 state troopers had bivouacked at the Route 32 parking lot, the singing and chants coming from the complete darkness in the encampment grew louder. News reporters from at least four media outfits had arrived. Press photographers and cameramen roamed the crowd with bright lights to illuminate their shots. Everyone was waiting for whatever came next.
A helicopter buzzed into view overhead at 10:15. Its chopping rotors echoed in the quad as it began to circle, the beam of its spotlight snapped on.
At 10:23, lieutenant William Shaw of the University Police pulled his SUV up and broadcasted his message from a loudspeaker his SUV to the crowd.
“You must leave this vicinity immediately. If you remain in this immediate vicinity, you will be in violation of New York State law,” the message said. “No matter what purposes, you must leave. If you do not disperse, you may be arrested and or subject to other police action that may include actual physical removal, using a prior-control agent, and/or less receiving munitions. This could cause risk of injury to those who remain. Following routes are available to the north of you.”
Shaw advised the crowd that they had two more minutes.
The crowd did not disperse.
Not long after Shaw’s order for the crowd to disperse, at the southern end of the quad about 60 state police officers walked single file to form a line in the darkness. Revealed in pockets of lamp light, the troopers wore helmets and loose grey uniforms. Each brandished an unpainted wooden baton near 26 inches long. A few of the troopers held German shepherds by their leashes.
Once their line was formed, the troopers advanced in gradual increments toward the students.
Asked the young woman with the bullhorn, “What if I see someone else interacting with law enforcement?” She answered her own question. “You need to be thoughtful about how your actions impact other people outside of you. When other people get involved in a law-enforcement interaction, the cops can use it as an excuse to escalate. We are trying to de-escalate.”
The plan was to sit together in a ring, arms interlocked, which she told them was illegal, but peaceful.
“That is considered resisting arrest,” she told the crowd. “And that will be the position they put you in. This is not your main character moment. They’re the only ones responsible for these actions. It is not your fault. Do not victim-blame yourself with things that will happen.”
When the police line had advanced to within ten feet of the students, the officers began to snatch individual protesters up from the ground where they were sitting. They restrained them, zip-tied them, and placed them back behind the troop’s line. The troopers rushed forward in pairs and small groups.
The frightened crowd screamed.
A student who gave her name as Theo was affiliated with the contingent of the protestors serving in an emergency medical capacity and so was not sitting locked-arms with the other students. She was grabbed by the state troopers, anyway.
“I was thrown onto my stomach with my legs pulled up and my arms behind me,” she reported afterwards, “and held down with a knee to my back while I was zip-tied and then led off to the building for processing.“
Democratic Party chair in New Paltz and former campaign manager for district attorney Emmanuel Nneji, Evan Holland-Shepler was also arrested.
“What was happening was students were circled with their arms locked,” said Holland-Shepler, “sitting on the ground chanting. And thugs with batons, with canines, and with pepper guns came up to us and indiscriminately began arresting people. For the most part, it was just them grabbing, manhandling, shoving, like grabbing them behind their line, and then, like, you know, forcing them to fall on the ground and then putting on the zip ties.”
Other than shouting and holding up their phones, the crowd was not intervening. The troopers had now begun to grab the sitting students by their ankles and drag them on their backs over the grass to behind their lines where they were then zip-tied.
A student who gave his name as Jonas managed to avoid near-arrest after bringing his shouted insults too close to the line of troopers.
“They almost got me,” he said, laughing nervously.
Jonas suggested that there had been unseen pressure brought to bear on the college president to bring the cops in.
“In the end, the administrators are just trying to keep their jobs,” he said.
As frightening as the police were compared to the administrators, Jonas reasoned that at least the state troopers were acting consistently with their job. It hadn’t been the troopers’ choice that they had been brought out to the grassy field.
“Yeah, right,” said Jonas. “They go where they’re told and they do what they’re told to do.”
Holland-Shepler and Theo both were placed in a line of students and other arrestees. Accusing the troopers of indifference, Theo recalled a woman in her 70s who had collapsed. Some of the arrested students called to the students watching from the nearby dorm to get an ambulance for her.
“She was just lying there for five ten minutes and then when they finally paid attention they couldn’t get her zip ties off,” Theo said. “No one had brought the knife or whatever to cut them off. They even pulled her along the grass from the circle, too, an old woman.”
After processing and picture-taking, Theo would end up being driven by state troopers to the New Paltz police station. Holland-Shepler was taken to a substation at the Esopus town hall in a sheriff’s correctional van. Holland-Shepler said the whole experience after arrest probably took about three hours.
“They just released these students without giving any access to a phone to make a phone call, any access to call a lawyer,” he said. “They just let them loose in the middle of Esopus. I grew up in New Paltz, so I knew where I was.”
Other than having no access to a bathroom, Holland Shepler found his time in the van enjoyable. He didn’t regret the behavior that got him there.
“It was congenial,” he said. “We sang protest songs. That whole protest …. I want to say this right now, I have been to dozens of protests in my life. This was the most loving, caring protest I’ve ever seen. Not a hint of antisemitism. It was focused directly on solidarity and on the issue.”
Theo was released at 3:30 in the morning, She said she had never been offered to make a call.
Earlier the same day, Theo was in the crowd receiving advice from the young woman with the bullhorn about how it would go should she be arrested. For this, she said she was grateful, It made her less afraid in the moment.
“[At SUNY New Paltz] they actually have some quotes on the wall in a building called Worcester Hall,” said Theo, “that claims that people should fight for change and people should advocate for it. If they had just been willing to fight for our words and go to their people above and discuss the issues the students brought up with the SUNY system as a whole, hey. And if there had just been a little bit more fight for our protection and our words and our concerns, then I don’t think it would have gone this way.”
New Paltz Village deputy mayor Alexandria Wojcik, who was at the protest but was not arrested, spoke out about actions taken by law enforcement.
“What I witnessed last night on campus was not listening, but instead a horrific display of university-sanctioned brutal police force,” Wojcik said in a statement.
Ulster County district attorney Emmanuel Nneji released a statement on Friday afternoon. “I completely support the free exercise of free speech and association. I wholeheartedly encourage the use of these rights to oppose human indignities and atrocities anywhere they occur,” Nneji wrote. “I encourage our young and old, students and all, to abide [by] the law and the rights and interests of others, whether or not they are sympathetic to your cause, as you push for a better today and tomorrow for everyone. Even as we disagree about any particular issue, we must first recognize and accept the right of everyone to be safe, including peaceful protesters and police officers.”
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