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More than a quarter of protesters arrested Tuesday at Columbia University and 60 percent of those arrested at the City College of New York had no connections to the institutions, according to data from the New York Police Department.
Police arrested 282 protesters at the two New York schools on Tuesday. Of the 112 arrested at Columbia, 32 were not affiliated with the school, according to police. At CCNY, police said 102 of the 170 arrested there were not affiliated with that school.
More than 2,000 people have been arrested since last month, when the arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia set off a wave of activism at college campuses across the country.
New York Mayor Eric Adams and law enforcement officials had previously said that “outside agitators” were co-opting protests in the city, which escalated this week when people barricaded themselves in Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, an academic building on the university’s Morningside Heights campus. Columbia officials had said the occupation was led by protesters who were not affiliated with the university.
About 40 percent of those arrested at Columbia on Tuesday were occupying the university’s Hamilton Hall, according to school officials. Thirteen of those protesters were unaffiliated with Columbia or other universities, university spokesman Ben Chang said Thursday during a news briefing.
Of the other protesters arrested in Hamilton Hall, 14 were Columbia undergraduate students, nine were graduate students, six were students at affiliated institutions and two were university employees, Chang said. Forty-four protesters were arrested in the hall in total.
“The numbers shared by the NYPD about arrests made on April 30 reflect the expectations we had regarding the occupation of Hamilton Hall,” Chang said on Thursday.
Police officers in riot gear cleared Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night. Officers on Tuesday also arrested protesters about a mile north at the City College of New York.
University leaders, politicians and members of law enforcement said repeatedly that protests at both locations were being influenced by outside agitators - claims disputed by some students and faculty members.
Rebecca Weiner, the police department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said on Tuesday that officers observed an escalation in tactics at Columbia on Monday night, including people scaling buildings, creating barricades with furniture and destroying cameras.
“We think these tactics are a result of guidance that’s being given to students from some of these external actors,” she said.
Adams said on Wednesday that even if the majority of protesters were students, “you don’t have to be the majority to influence and co-opt an operation.”
Some students and faculty strongly denied that protests were being escalated by those outside the universities.
Columbia history professor Mae Ngai told Al Jazeera that protests at the university were led by students and that politicians were the outside agitators.
“They’re the outsiders trying to tell our university how to run its affairs,” she told the outlet.
Student protesters who spoke at a news conference Wednesday outside CCNY called the involvement of outside agitators a “myth.”
New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban said Tuesday that “professional outsiders” were putting students at risk by “exploiting” originally peaceful protests.
“We will never tolerate violence, property damage or the disruption of emergency services,” he said.