Protests grow after NYPD shuts down encampments at NYU and New School

GREENWICH VILLAGE, N.Y. (PIX11) -- After police shut down tent encampments at two more New York City colleges on Friday morning, protests against the actions took place, involving far more people than had been involved in the encampments.

Organizers and participants said that it was an indication that the crackdown only serves to enhance and enlarge their protest movement. 

Erica Williamson was one of hundreds of people who came out to the plaza in front of NYU's John A. Paulson Center late Friday afternoon. "[I'm] out here to protest all the repression," she said, responding to the shutdown of the tent encampment that had been in the plaza for most of the week.

Another protester, Hannah Siegel, echoed that sentiment. "It's everyone's obligation to protect this university," she said in the NYU plaza, "as a place where people of color can continue to exist and thrive."

Around 6:00 a.m. police took down the tents at NYU, and at the New School, about 15 blocks north. 

By early afternoon, work crews were scrubbing down the sidewalk in front of the Paulson Center. They were removing messages written in chalk calling for NYU to divest -- to withdraw its financial holdings in corporations with ties to Israel and the war in Gaza. 

The work crews were next to about a half-dozen NYPD officers and NYU public safety agents who stood behind metal barricades. The barriers had been set up to keep people out from where the encampment have been. Officers had arrested 13 protesters who'd been in the tents. 

Robert Jereski lives nearby. When he saw that the NYU encampment had been taken down, he said that he was very disappointed. 

"Just washing them away and not respecting their rights to speak, to protest," Jereski said, "What kind of country is this?" 

Meira Gold is an NYU professor who'd advised the protesters in the encampment. "I'm really angry," she said upon seeing the empty space where the tents had been. 

"This is illegal," she continued. "It is a privately-owned public space. So, right now, the NYPD and NYU are illegally occupying this walkway." 

Signage on the building facing the plaza where the encampment had been clearly states that the plaza is open to the public. 

Meanwhile, at the New School, protesters were on hand on Friday evening. They had marched there from NYU, connecting the two locations where the NYPD had removed encampments. 

In the case of the New School, that had happened around 6:00 a.m., also. 43 people were put under arrest. 

It happened three days after officers removed protesters at Columbia University who'd taken over Hamilton Hall there. On Friday, though, the NYPD had to address the fact that an ESU sergeant's gun had gone off when cops entered the building in the Tuesday night raid. 

At a news conference on Friday morning, Assistant Chief Carlos Valdez, who oversees the NYPD's Emergency Services Unit, took questions about what had happened. 

"It's called an accident for a reason," he said about what the eight-year veteran of the department's most elite unit had done. 

"He unintentionally pulled the trigger of his weapon and discharged his firearm" in an area of Hamilton Hall where nobody had been at the time of the police action, Valdez said. 

"Moving forward," the chief continued, "we will obviously counsel the officer and send him to retraining, and re-evaluate him, and we'll take it from there."