This week, on campuses across the U.S., college students demonstrated against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Rather than wait out the protesting students, who will soon leave their campuses for the summer, multiple colleges and universities called in local and state police.
At colleges as geographically diverse as Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and Emory University, riot police have contained student protests – breaking up encampments and arresting protesters. At USC, police allegedly fired rubber bullets at students. And at Emory University, students reported police used tear gas and tasers against protesters.
The use of riot police to break up peaceful protests may feel surprising in the context of a university campus. But this has become an increasingly common feature of protest management in the United States.
Regulate, separate, crack down
In the 1980s and 1990s, many U.S. cities – and university campuses – adopted a negotiated management style of dealing with protest. Under negotiated management, protest organizers would apply for permits to protest. They would inform authorities about their plans and negotiate over event details such as the date, time, and protest routes. Protest leaders could be reasonably assured that police would allow them to engage in bounded acts of disruption as part of their permitted protest. Yet, while some officers were developing specialized negotiation skills, others were being trained to be part of new Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, two fundamentally different approaches. While negotiated management conceptualized force as a last resort, these new special units focused on force, not negotiation.
In the early 2000s, after a wave of anti-globalization protests as well as the 9/11 attacks, the negotiated management style of policing began to break down. Increasingly focused on public disorder, police attempted to micro-manage protests. Police departments began to dictate rather than negotiate the terms for permits.
Rather than skilled negotiation, the primary protest management goal shifted to neutralizing threats. Police began to distinguish between “good” protesters, who participate in the increasingly controlled permit system, and “bad” or transgressive protesters, who refuse to play ball with authorities. This meant that transgressive protesters, even when engaged in peaceful protest, became more likely to be managed by police relying on arrests – and a broad arsenal of nonlethal weapons, such as pepper spray and rubber bullets.
We can see this pattern play out in this month’s protests at the University of Texas at Austin. University authorities revoked permission to protest and negotiations between protesters and campus police fell apart. Once protesters were engaged in a non-permitted protest with channels of negotiation closed, campus authorities could frame them as a threat to be neutralized. The university called in police. Officers in riot gear arrested protesters this week while mounted police officers used their horses to push through and disperse crowds of protesters.
Current moves to regulate protest activities on university campuses may dampen students’ ability to engage in civic life. State legislatures have also introduced measures to curtail public protests. These moves seem likely to create an even larger category of “bad” protesters – citizens that authorities view as deserving repression.
Heather Sullivan is a 2024-2025 Good Authority fellow.