Eric Adams under pressure to divulge details on ‘outside agitators’ at campus protests
The New York City mayor has claimed police arrested protesters after non-student elements escalated the situation
The New York City mayor, Eric Adams,
remains under pressure to divulge how many of the 282 people arrested
at campus protests in Manhattan on Tuesday night were non-students after
repeatedly claiming that “outside agitators” were responsible for
escalations that prompted an overwhelming law enforcement crackdown.
Adams,
a Democrat and former city police officer, was asked by local reporters
on Thursday morning to give a breakdown of the arrest numbers. He
repeatedly declined to provide details.
On
a local Fox News channel, Adams was asked to provide firm details but
instead gave an analogy: “If you have one bad professor educating 30,
40, 50 college students with inappropriate actions, you don’t need 50
bad professors speaking to 50 students.”
He added that “if it’s one, if it’s two, it’s 20, that is what we need to be focusing on”.
The
mayor was asked to provide specifics again on the local station NY1 and
declined to do so by offering the same analogy. When pressed to provide
further details, he said his office had “turned everything over to the
school, and it is up to the school to determine if they’re going to
release the names of students and non-students”.
Police arrest nearly 300 Gaza protesters at New York universities – video
The Guardian requested confirmation of receipt of arrest lists from both Columbia University and the City College of New York
(CCNY), and asked whether the institutions planned to divulge details
breaking down the numbers of arrests. Neither immediately responded.
Later
on Thursday, the New York police department issued a press release
saying that among those arrested at Columbia, “approximately 29% of
individuals were not affiliated” with the school, while 60% of people
arrested at the CCNY protests were not affiliated with the school. It
was not immediately clear how the police were defining “affiliation”,
and the release did not break down arrest figures in further detail.
“What
we have seen, and what has been made clear by the evidence emerging
after this week’s arrests, is that professional, external actors are
involved in these protests and demonstrations,” the NYPD commissioner,
Edward Caban, said in the release. “These individuals are not university
students, they are not affiliated with either the institutions or
campuses in question, and they are working to escalate the situation.”
Police escort protesters onto a bus after making arrests at City College of New York, on Wednesday. Photograph: Julius Motal/AP
The
comments came as some of those arrested expressed shock at the police’s
handling of the episode. Dr Gregory Pflugfelder, an associate
professor, told the Guardian he was arrested by officers as he
photographed law enforcement from outside his apartment on a block near
where police began their operation.
Pflugfelder,
who has taught at Columbia since 1996, said he was placed in police zip
ties and detained after he refused to stop photographing. He was held
in detention, where he said he observed a young person who claimed they
had occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall and sustained a facial
injury during arrest.
Pflugfelder was released
at about 5am the next day, he said, and charged with obstruction. The
Japanese history and gender studies lecturer had, the day before, taught
his final class before retirement. He described the police response as
“appallingly out of proportion” and described the entire episode as “a
historic betrayal of Columbia values”.
In the
immediate aftermath of the mass arrests, Adams told the press that NYPD
intelligence had identified a number of “outside influencers” before
receiving a written request
from Columbia University to remove protesters from campus and the
Hamilton Hall building, which was occupied by protesters earlier in the
week.
Police use a special vehicle to enter Hamilton Hall, which protesters occupied at Columbia University, on Tuesday. Photograph: David Dee Delgado/Reuters
The mayor claimed in an interview with MSNBC
on Wednesday that protesters “wearing all the black” and “covering your
faces” may have been influenced by outside forces by referencing a
recent international trip made by the NYPD’s intelligence division to an
unspecified country to “study this type of behavior across the globe”.
Adams
has also claimed in multiple interviews that outside influences
included an individual whose “husband was arrested for and convicted for
terrorism on a federal level”. He claimed to MSNBC that the woman,
along with other “outside influences”, could be exploiting students
involved in protest.
“Once we were able to
identify some of the other people, I knew there was no way I was going
to allow those children to be exploited the way that they were being
exploited,” Adams told the news channel on Wednesday.
While authorities have not specifically named the woman, media reports indicate
she is Nahla Al-Arian, the wife of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer
engineering professor and a prominent Palestinian activist throughout
the 1990s.
Eric
Adams holds up the request from Columbia University asking for the NYPD
to clear protesters from Columbia’s campus during a press conference,
on Wednesday. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
In
an interview with the Associated Press, Nahla Al-Arian said authorities
had significantly misrepresented her role in the campus protests, which
she acknowledged she attended over a week ago, but not to discuss
protest tactics.
“The whole thing is a
distraction because they are very scared that the young Americans are
aware for the first time of what’s going on in Palestine,” she said.
“They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who gave me hope
that at last the Palestinian people can get some justice.”
The
2003 indictment of Sami Al-Arian, 13 charges under the Patriot Act
related to alleged support for Palestine Islamic Jihad, was shrouded in
significant controversy. A jury found the Florida-based engineering
professor not guilty on eight counts and remained deadlocked on the
remaining charges. However, Al-Arian eventually took a plea agreement to
one charge and was later deported.
On
Wednesday evening, the Guardian observed the first round of arraignment
hearings at the Manhattan criminal court, where a mix of protesters and
others scheduled for hearings appeared before two judges.
Police arrest protesters at the City College of New York, on Tuesday. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
During
chaotic hearings, the Guardian was able to identify only one
non-student charged over his involvement in the protests, a 47-year-old
man accused of assault in second degree and obstruction of a government
official.
The atmosphere inside the courthouse
was unusually energetic for night proceedings. About two dozen student
activists and supporters, many clad in keffiyehs, huddled together in
the hallways, getting information from public defenders and ducking into
arraignment rooms to find their friends as they were being released.
One
arrestee, a City College student, declined to be interviewed shortly
after his release on charges of second-degree assault, property damage
and resisting arrest.
Prosecutors said on
Wednesday that about 170 of those arrested were issued summonses, while
the remaining had been given desk appearance tickets or would continue
to wind their way through processing into Thursday.
In a statement, the Legal Aid Society expressed concerns that some protesters had been held in custody for over 24 hours.
“Lawyers
from various public defender offices and other organizations were
present in court last night and ready to quickly arraign everyone but
many protesters were not produced,” the statement said, adding that many
protesters were ultimately charged with low-level criminal trespass
offenses and should have been released sooner by authorities.