The Kids The Guns Are For
The same police force that failed Uvalde children is arresting peaceful student protesters at UT Austin. It's not about safety. It's about order.
For 77 minutes while a gunman massacred fourth-graders at an Uvalde, Texas elementary school in 2022, members of the Texas Department of Public Safety roamed school hallways. Not once during that time did they attempt to open the doors to the classrooms in which the gunman was killing children and teachers.
On Wednesday, however, the Texas DPS took a different approach to campus safety. Dressed in riot gear, the state police force descended on the University of Texas at Austin, aggressively detaining protesters and tackling a television cameraman at a nonviolent pro-Palestine protest, leading to at least 30 arrests.
Student protests have blossomed on college campuses this week, inspired by an encampment of Columbia University students who demanded their school divest from Israel amid its war on Gaza. Despite those protests remaining peaceful, police have responded with force, arresting demonstrators en masse while politicians like Republican Sens. Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley call for the deployment of federal troops to campus.
These escalations against students are a choice. Police can be patient, even passive. The Texas DPS proved that when they loitered outside the ongoing slaughter of grade-schoolers. Indeed, data shows that police are not primarily crime-fighters, devoting a small percentage of their stops to suspected crimes and a much greater percentage to things like racially biased traffic stops. Their work, by the numbers, is foremost the enforcement of order and inequality along race and class lines.
It’s why the proliferation of campus police has not stopped the upward trend of school shootings, but has led to disproportionate arrests and police assaults on students of color. And it’s why college students’ demonstration against a U.S.-backed war that has seen the mass death of children commands a more urgent police crackdown than an active shooting.
“Shit, if only they’d have moved like that when my son was being murdered,” the father of a murdered Uvalde child tweeted above footage of Texas DPS officers in riot gear storming toward unarmed students at UT Austin. “But what do I expect….1 AR-15 keeps 376 officers at bay.”
The justifications for these crackdowns vary. Liberal college administrators and politicians like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have suggested that the protests pose a public safety risk requiring a police response.
The counterargument is obvious: no one was hurt during this week’s protest at New York University (in Hochul’s state) until police stormed a student protest that was taking place in a 24-hour open plaza, hauling away demonstrators and pepper spraying student journalists in the face.
And while there has been a violent attack at a pro-Palestinian demonstration near UT Austin, it happened in February, when a 36-year-old man allegedly pulled a 23-year-old Palestinian-American out of a vehicle from which the younger man had been flying a Palestinian scarf. The attacker allegedly “repeatedly screamed the N-word and other obscenities” and stabbed the 23-year-old in the ribs with a knife. That attack, curiously, did not spark an outpouring of police protection for pro-Palestinian events in Austin; on Tuesday a district attorney declined to charge the attacker with a hate crime.
For politicians on the right, the crackdowns are even less about safety. The protests serve as an opportunity to exhibit more open bloodlust against students, dovetailing with ongoing conservative efforts to bring higher education to heel.
“Arrests being made now & will continue until the crowd disperses,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted of the UT Austin protest, which had been placid until DPS began shoving participants and press. “These protesters belong in jail.”
Abbott, a campus culture warrior, has no such hangups when the protesters uphold his party’s status quo. In 2019, he signed a law that allowed anyone to demonstrate on campus college grounds, and created penalties for students who interfered with those demonstrations—a law some on the left feared would be used to platform bigots. It’s only when student protesters threaten Abbott’s interests that he calls for state repression. In April, he signed an executive order singling out pro-Palestinian campus groups and requiring Texas schools to adopt new speech policies that incorrectly conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
To Abbott and other Republican governors, higher education represents a unique institutional threat—a rare industry that has not been entirely given over to private business interests, and that historically serves as a hotbed for dissent. Campus demonstrations against a U.S.-backed war allow those conservative leaders to crack down on schools in the name of local and international order.
In How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy, Jenny Odell writes that American precarity, exemplified by the near-total lack of a social safety net, has led to a system in which students have the fewest incentives against protest.
“Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students,” Odell writes, adding that students often have fewer economic gains to lose than older peers.
Though often poor and in precarious positions, students are also often less receptive to threats on their employment (which is, at best, in early stages) and frequently have few-to-no dependents who rely on their care. In turn, student protests have succeeded when universities take on a caring role for their students, Odell notes, citing the decision of the historically Black Bennett College to support students who participated in the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins.
And while university administrators at schools like Columbia and NYU called the police on their students, some educators resisted, with NYU faculty standing between their students and police, allowing themselves to be arrested first. Acts like these are networks of care kicking in, of people sharing and shouldering risks borne by those less powerful than them.
This, of course, is the premise of the campus protests. These are young people accepting not-insubstantial risks (suspension, expulsion, diminished career prospects, arrest, injury) in the hopes that their schools will stop investing in tech firms, financial institutions, and weapons manufacturers that have enabled mass death in Gaza. Those deaths must not be overlooked in debates about free speech and on-campus optics.
34,151 Palestinians have been reported dead in Israel’s Gaza bombardment. 14,685 of them are children, according to the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on Monday. Children number among the more than 77,000 Palestinians injured. And they are certainly among the more than 7,000 people presumed dead beneath rubble.
The images and stories of children’s suffering in Gaza are so many that to summarize them is both impossible and insufficient. A toddler wounded beyond description. A father holding a small figure in a shroud. A premature infant in an incubator, born an orphan after an airstrike killed her mother, father, and three-year-old sister. That latter airstrike last weekend reportedly killed 22 Palestinians, 18 of them children, in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where millions of Palestinians have taken refuge after being ordered to evacuate from the north.
These are blindingly obvious things for anyone—particularly young people—to protest, which is why backlash to the protests so seldom dignifies the students’ demands, but instead veers into safety concerns and spurious allegations of antisemitism. (On this latter point, should I argue that many of the protest participants are Jewish? that I’m an identifiably Jewish person who has experienced antisemitism? that the Texas GOP is absolutely stuffed to the gills with antisemites? I don’t imagine any of these arguments will make a drop of difference to someone committed to smearing the protests or their participants.)
The police response on college campuses does little for public safety or protection of Jewish students. Statistically, police have seldom filled this role. The same Texas DPS that made mass arrests at UT Austin on Wednesday also shoved away students who protested a speech by open antisemite Richard Spencer at Texas A&M University in 2016, and handcuffed Uvalde parents who demanded DPS save their children from a school shooting.
Instead, college campuses are seeing boomeranging of empire: the horses, the demands for troops, the insistence that these students are less than American. NYU, a campus that prominently advertises itself as a “Campus Without Walls,” has constructed wooden walls around the public plaza where students and faculty protested this week. When a Texas DPS officer marches into a protest with a baton in hand and three rifle magazines in his vest (seriously, look at this), he is not there to protect students. He is not a peacekeeper but the protector of war abroad. His weapons are an implicit threat against U.S. students, in service of an explicit threat against Palestinians.
These students are calling for ceasefire. America’s militarized police forces are bringing the war home.