And the whole wide world is watchin'

NY State Troopers, Sheriff's Emergency Response Team, called onto the SUNY New Paltz by Pres. Wheeler; peaceful pro-Palestine encampment of 133 students, faculty and community members arrested.

May 03, 2024

Oh, the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'
Like the stillness in the wind
Before the hurricane begins
The hour that the ship comes in
—Dylan

Photos by Eric Francis and Joaquin Broughton

Text by Eric Francis. For prior article, see AMERICAN SPRING.

THERE ARE TWO THEORIES of what a protest is for.

One is to make a point about an issue, to bring attention it, and maybe to score a victory. The other is that a protest serves to bring out the nature of the beast.

Faced with a peaceful, antiwar sit-in protesting Isreal’s continued bombing and occupation of Gaza, Darrell Wheeler, president of the State University of New York at New Paltz, invited New York State Troopers and Ulster Counter Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, onto the campus.

Spectrum News was on scene at New Paltz and got excellent video. Their reporter was arrested in the fracas. The Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team also responded at New Paltz. Their usual job is to put down prison riots. Kingston Wire is reporting that the New Paltz town police also participated in the action against students and that 150 officers total were involved — more than one for every protester arrested. The Oracle student newspaper has provided outstanding coverage of the arrests.

The encampment, one of many that has sprung up around the United States since one was busted at Columbia University in mid-April, was established Wednesday, and students had just spent one night there.

It barely seemed like a protest; it was a little cluster of tents on the lawn, with the students taking care of food, security and other basic needs. The military response you’ll see in the following photos was directed against what you see above. I covered this Thursday night in American Spring.

The protest was set on a grass-covered residential quadrangle where there is no foot traffic; there are a few picnic tables, trees and wide sidewalks all around it. The students were not breaking any law, and were only in violation of a campus rule — till they took down their tents.

*Michael Patterson, SUNY New Paltz assistant vice president for student affairs, offers students a two hour extension on Thursday night. Photo by Eric Francis.*

Thursday afternoon, the Pres. Wheeler spoke with students, and offered a deal if they would remove the tents and go into closed negotiations. Students countered with an offer for open negotiations and then removing the tents.

Thursday at 7 pm, Michael Patterson, an assistant vice president for student affairs, descended from the administration building, and informed the students that they had moved the deadline to 9 pm. When I tried to question him, he strode across the campus with an assistant repeating “no comment, no comment.”

Meanwhile, I left the campus briefly to drive around the perimeter. I discovered that New York State Troopers and Sheriff’s deputies where mustering in the parking lot of Campus Police headquarters. I still could not believe they would be organized to pull this off.

“The whole time cops were so incompetent, they didn't even have scissors to cut the zip ties off us on hand,” one student wrote to he this morning. “Some of them have never even been to New Paltz before last night and were trying to be buddy-buddy with us only moments after body slamming us on the floor.”

*At about 7 pm, students and community members practice the posture they will use to resist the police. Photo by Eric Francis.*

Then they moved out and set up three staging areas, essentially surrounding the quadrangle where the students had their tents pitched. My car was parked in what became one of those staging area. I spoke with the cops for a while, who seemed to be in good spirit and were not wearing riot gear.

State police and sheriffs established one of three staging areas in the parking lot of the student health center, where I had parked (and ended up parked in for several hours). They chatted casually among themselves and with students, not shown, outside the right side of the frame. Photo by Eric Francis.

When they moved out just after 9 pm, I picked up my camera and went back to the quad, unsure where they went. Then I heard a rumor that they were donning riot gear. On the quad, about 150 students had formed a circle with their arms linked, facing outward, around a large tree — a maneuver they had practiced earlier in the evening.

Overhead, a State Police helicopter shined a bright spotlight on the crowd, while three drones sent video of the scene through a closed-circuit police television system. Between full surveillance from the air and the three staging areas that surrounded the protest, the effect was a full-on tactical assault on the students. Kingston Wire reported that four police agencies and 150 officers were involved — more than the number of students than were arrested.

This extraordinary action seemed to be justified or rather rationalized by the notion that a large portion of the protesters were not students — and that this was some kind of unnatural, off-campus operation. While the organizers had it together and were well-informed, I did not notice any unusual presence of people who seemed like ‘outsiders’. Among those in the protest with the students were several faculty members and community members.

The skills the organizers used required some natural leadership ability and maybe about one afternoon of civil disobedience training. But they were impeccably prepared. This was not a complicated direct action. But it was unprecedented for SUNY New Paltz (which my editors used to jokingly call SUNY No Pulse). Nowhere within the 64-campus SUNY system has anything resembling this had happened for two generations.

However, a sit-in is one thing. Authorities responding to it with a war machine is quite another.

*Student protesters at SUNY New Palz watch nervousl, with their arms linked, as the police line approaches. Photo by Eric Francis.*

Police formed a line in front of Gage Residence Hall, and marched incrementally across the quadrangle, approaching the approximately 150 protesters, who sat with their arms linked. Then the arrests began, starting at about 8 pm and continuing into the early hours of the morning.

The disproportionality of the police response was astounding. In my knowledge of the State University system, nothing even close to this has happened since the spring of 1970, at the peak of student protests against American wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

In last night’s article, American Spring, I proposed that Pres. Wheeler would be taking the fall for this, if peaceful student protesters were arrested. We shall see. Hundreds of students were streaming recording video of the incident. There was very little professional media presence there — that I could see, only myself and Hudson Valley One, a local newspaper and website (which provided a measure of live coverage that I followed remotely through an associate editor).

Students were highly organized and had many drivers ready to pick up protesters at various courts across the local region, including in Highland, Ellenville and New Paltz. They were arraigned and charged with simple trespassing, which is a violation, not a misdemeanor.

Here are additional photos.

More coverage Friday on Planet Waves FM.