Above photo: In the early morning of May 31, heavily armed police in riot gear surrounded student protesters. Kyle Allemand.
“We Are Going To Hurt You.”
A brutal, nine-hour, multi-agency police assault against unarmed protesters at UC Santa Cruz shows the university would rather use violence against its own students than address demands to divest from genocide.
Before midnight on May 30, 2024, police officers from across California descended on the Gaza Solidarity encampment at UC Santa Cruz. Numbering in the few hundreds, police from the UC Santa Cruz, UC San Francisco, UC Davis, UC Riverside, as well as San Jose, San Bruno, San Mateo, Daly City, Pacifica, South San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Watsonville police departments, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, and the California Highway Patrol responded to a request, authorized by UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive, for “mutual aid.”
What ensued was a brutal multi-agency assault by CHP and other police against unarmed protesters that lasted for nine hours and resulted in significant injuries. During a time of lean UC budgets, the vast scale of the police operation at UCSC to suppress organizing for Palestine solidarity and divestment from the Israeli occupation is sure to have been costly. “Millions of dollars likely went into the planning, coordination, and execution of the police action that brutalized and traumatized comrades, colleagues, friends, and fellow travelers in our place of work,” stated Nick Mitchell, a UCSC faculty member.
Chancellor Constructs Pretext To Sic Cops On Students
In public messages before and after the violent police sweep of the encampment, Chancellor Larive sought to rationalize the use of state force against students by asserting that protesters had prevented “an emergency medical vehicle from entering a facility in which a toddler was in distress” two days prior to the raid. Yet copious eyewitness testimony, backed by photos and video evidence, contradict this account. Calling on the chancellor to resign immediately, residents of the facility have criticized Larive for “cynically exploit[ing] a family’s traumatic experience in order to construct a narrative that attempts to justify police brutality.” They contended it was “Larive’s decision to unleash the police upon members of the UCSC community,” and not the protesters, that created potentially lethal conditions on campus.
By deploying militarized police against the Gaza solidarity encampment, Larive appears to have badly undercut her standing at UC Santa Cruz. “Her actions indicate poor leadership of our diverse campus, with dire consequences for our community at a time we most need to come together,” stated Associate Professor of Literature Amanda M. Smith. “Chancellor Larive must course correct now by owning her mistakes, reversing campus bans for arrested people, and beginning the long hard work toward repair.”
Prior to the police raid, over 160 UCSC senate faculty signed an open petition cautioning Larive against deploying police to clear the encampment. During a two-week window, an overwhelming majority of senate faculty voted in favor of a formal resolution calling on campus leadership “to commit to peace and dialogue when engaging with demonstrators” and “to refrain from bringing police to campus to break up, disperse, or arrest participants in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment or related demonstrations.” The vote results were finally released on June 6, six days after Larive deployed over 300 police against protesters.
Encircled By Police
On May 30, roughly an hour before entering the camp, police established and began patrolling an outer perimeter that extended from Westlake Elementary School in the east to the campus arboretum in the west, a distance of three miles. Few media accounts have captured the magnitude of the police operation, which continued from the evening of May 30 into the morning and day of May 31. Beyond the visible police presence and the multi-agency encirclement of protesters in the encampment, there was an outer perimeter that served as a line of arrest, with the earliest occurring around 1:00 am on May 31 when a bicyclist approached the periphery. In effect, there were inner and outer perimeters of police who encircled the encampment.
At 11:52 pm, officers dressed in riot gear marched into the encampment. These police formed the inner perimeter, and their purpose was to assault and arrest protesters. Students, faculty, and community members formed lines of defense and self-protection. For the next eight and a half hours, police brutally kettled and assaulted protesters, surrounding them on all sides. Every ten to fifteen minutes, the police attacked in waves, rushing targeted sections of the captive group with concentrated force, and in many cases, grabbing and pulling on protesters by their necks. All throughout, they wielded their batons as weapons, jabbing them directly into the vital organs of protesters and aiming as high as women’s chests. A number of students had to go to the emergency room because of the injuries they sustained. The goal appeared to be to inflict grave injury in an effort to reduce the number of protesters.
As their colleagues brutalized protesters, other police oversaw and took part in the destruction of the encampment that had once been home to many students, some of whom were otherwise unhoused. The police used bulldozers to raze tents, the medical station, the kitchen, the art space, and the vibrant People’s University. They tore down Palestinian flags, handmade banners, and public art, and, in an especially callous act, ripped apart body bags displayed in a memorial with flowers and martyrs’ names despite protesters’ uproar not to touch them. Dozens of decorated signs were sprayed with a potentially hazardous chemical solvent. “I watched as the beautiful tents were torn apart, our food, medical, and supply tent swept away by the cops. We shouted at them, pleading with them to stop and rethink what they were doing,” recounted a protester who stood on the line for thirteen hours straight.
By 8:00 am, police had completely blocked the intersection of High and Bay at the base of campus and the High and Western intersection down the road. This blockade prevented food, medical care, supportive community members, journalists with press badges, and legal observers from entering the parking lot where captive protesters were being assaulted adjacent to the barn theater. One protester recalled, “I suffocated several times and felt as if my body would explode with how much it was being pushed and shoved by the cops.” Protesters shouted at legal observers and journalists, “They [police] are hurting us!” and “We can’t breathe!” They also attempted unsuccessfully to move as a group toward the journalists so the latter could observe the waves of police assault at close range. Community members struggled to contact folks at the base of campus because of the use of service jammers by the police. Police brutalized protesters all night, denying them the ability to drink water, eat food, or use the bathroom.
Having isolated protesters from the surrounding community, police used assault as their primary means to arrest 112 students, 4 faculty, and 8 community members until almost 9:00 am. Protesters sustained battered ribs, concussions and other head injuries, nerve damage, sprained wrists and other extremities, severe bruising, and wounds related to zip-tie use, including lacerations requiring stitching. Students who were present on the scene as emergency medical technicians and first aid responders furnished trained medical care to injured protesters. At times, however, they were impeded from doing so because of the incessant police assaults on captive protesters. All frontline student medics were arrested.
One student was badly injured by a broken fence obscured by bushes, heroically running to aid comrades after police obstructed the safer paved path. Another community member was beaten with a bag over their head until they passed out. Videos show them struggling to hold their own body upright as they were put into a police vehicle and refused timely medical care. Witnesses said the bag also led to their suffocation and that the individual vomited as a result. Witnesses shouted for the bag to be removed. This protester later reported having been concussed and needing to seek treatment in the emergency room as a result of being assaulted by the police.
In addition to being subjected to criminal charges, most arrested students received 14-day bans, forcing those living on campus to scramble to find alternative lodging. They have struggled to access personal belongings and been denied basic needs, including a safe place to stay and ready access to food.
Countless Conduct Violations
While carrying out orders from Chancellor Larive, UC President Michael Drake, the UC Regents, and Governor Gavin Newsom, the multi-agency police force broke state law and their own codes of conduct. In violation of SB 98, a California law that guarantees media access to protests, even if such areas are “closed as command post, police line, or rolling closure,” the police prevented reporters from approaching the site where they had surrounded protesters. Describing the encampment as a “crime scene,” despite the fact that they had already razed the entire area, the police threatened reporters with arrest if they came closer. Although prohibited from assaulting, interfering with, or obstructing the work of journalists, the police tried to arrest a City on the Hill Press reporter and, as shown below, body-slammed a news photographer who had their camera out. The photographer suffered a serious concussion.
Legal observers were similarly denied access to the site as police brutalized students for hours. The vast majority of the police were also not outfitted with body cameras. When asked to show badge numbers, they purposely obscured them. “At every turn, the police sought to deflect transparency and the public interest in their activities,” stated an arrested faculty member. Even as the police refused legal observers and reporters the right to cover their activities, they used their personal phones to take selfies with captive students who were then targeted for arrest. In some cases, they stated to those protesters whom they singled out for selfies, “You’re next,” suggesting that such photos functioned as “trophy shots.”
Against regulation, the police used their batons to jab protesters repeatedly and aggressively, both in their stomachs and rib areas and, in the case of feminine-presenting students, in their chests. After being jabbed in between their breasts, one protester described an officer reaching inside their shirt and grabbing one of their breasts. They recalled yelling, “One of your officers touched me! How dare he?” at UCSC PD Lieutenant Greg Flippo who dismissed their statement. Numerous students were nauseated from baton thrusts to their stomachs, some to the point of needing to seek urgent medical care in the ER.
One person was beaten to the point of losing consciousness. “I was jabbed in the ribs repetitively, leaving me sore days after the raid,” they stated. “While holding the line with my friends, I fainted.” Police dragged their limp body away by their arm. Another protester “verbally signaled [their] willingness to be peacefully arrested by extending [their] arms out and away from each other to facilitate arrest,” but in response, a CHP officer “grabbed [them] by the front of [their] neck and then threw [them] to the floor.” A UCSC PD officer said to this person, “I’ll break your wrist if I have to,” before injuring their wrist.
Such violent threats were not uncommon. Around 8:15 am, CHP Commander Jason Grimm, who returned to Santa Cruz after completing a stint at Susanville, stated to the protestors, “We’re going to hurt you.”
After hours of being brutalized, arrested protesters were detained onsite, in some cases for an additional three and a half hours. They were then transported in campus loop buses, CHP vehicles, and sheriff’s department vans to two locations, the Santa Cruz County Jail and UCSC’s Delaware Street campus, to be processed. Few, if any, were read their rights. The loop buses used to detain and transport protesters, a majority of whom were tuition-paying UCSC students, were of the same outdated, poorly maintained model, found unsafe for use, in which bus driver Dan Stevenson lost his life in a preventable crash last December. These dangerous and obsolete machines are regarded by students and campus workers as a symbol of UCSC’s refusal to invest in its workers and students over profits; these same buses were repurposed by the administration to repress students protesting the institution’s callousness and genocidal war-profiteering.
Protesters detained on loop buses were denied access to food, water, and a toilet. “We told the cops multiple times that we had not had a chance to use the bathroom,” a protester recounted. “They told us they didn’t care and we would have a chance to use the bathroom once we got processed which ended up not being for another three hours.” In one case, a protester was not allowed to remove a tampon that they had been using for fourteen hours. “There were two police officers in charge of our loop bus, and I repeatedly told them I am risking toxic shock syndrome and septic shock if I keep the tampon in. They told me, ‘Too bad.’” With the assistance of several other zip-tied women on the bus, they were able to remove their tampon, an experience everyone involved described as degrading. After being held on site for hours, some students had no choice but to use the back stairwell of the bus as a makeshift toilet. “Meanwhile, on the other side of the bus, a group of cops were eating Costco pizza and our Gatorade, water bottles, and chips they had stolen from the camp,” stated an arrested student.
Discriminatory Targeting
Over the course of the brutal police raid, patterns of discrimination became clear. The police directed their violence principally against feminine-presenting, trans, and non-white protesters. One student recounted how “several of the women had their clothes ripped off. One particular trans comrade who was pleading for the cops to have any form of humanity had ‘trick’ screamed at her before her skirt was ripped off and she was thrown to the ground. All the while, they [police] laughed.” Another student pointed out that “We were organized by sex, not gender, and the cops called non-binary people ‘x-rays’ for the x identification on their license.” The driver of the police van called one of the segregated groups “females or whatevers.”
Protesters recall that most of the people targeted by the police for brutalization appeared to be women of color. “As the night went on into the morning, the police became much more aggressive and started targeting specific students, most of whom were women of color,” stated one student. Racialized as targets, women of color suffered grievous injuries. CHP officers with horizontal red lines at the top of their facial shields formed the front line of attack. Every ten to fifteen minutes, when the perimeter of police encircling the protesters closed in, a smaller contingent of red-line CHP officers violently rushed a select section, repeatedly attacking women of color. An arrestee recounted how “the bus predominantly held AFAB or fem-presenting people of color.”
Police of color appear also to have been viewed by commanding officers as points of vulnerability. When protesters of color pleaded with the non-white police officers, urging them to think of their families and their backgrounds, white police were sent in to replace them.
Strolling By Disaster
One of the strangest aspects of that deeply traumatic night and morning was the visit paid by Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer to the location where her students were being violently assaulted by the same police that she and Chancellor Larive had deployed against them. Wearing a large hoodie and a baseball cap, and with her pet dog by her side, Kletzer attempted to stroll by the grotesque spectacle of her students and faculty being badly kettled and brutally assaulted by the police.
Students chanted “Shame!” as Kletzer sought to walk past unrecognized. Many also noted her apparent grin as she witnessed the violence. “After hours of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of these riot police sent by the UCSC administration, witnessing our Campus Provost and Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer come to the site of the brutalization to spectate with a grin on her face was egregious beyond words,” stated an anonymous member of the student organization Jews Against White Supremacy (JAWS). “A person who not only is willing to call for this kind of force against members of our community protesting a genocide, but also delights in witnessing it, has absolutely no place leading an institution of higher education, much less any institution dedicated to the well-being of anyone. Her actions reflect a deep contempt for the people she is mandated to serve. I am devastated by her actions that have endangered and permanently injured us and cannot fathom her continuing to occupy a leadership role at UCSC.”
In a statement about the police violence, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCSC stated, “The UC has demonstrated a costly preference for using violence against its own students rather than addressing the demand it divest from an apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonial state. It spends more money protecting its financial interests in the Zionist colonial project instead of listening to its students and reinvesting that money in safety and community for students and workers. The community of Santa Cruz and all of California has seen this and responded with support for the activists and condemnation for the UC.”