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Los Angeles Police Department Begins Moving into Pro- Palestinian Protester Encampment on UCLA Campus to Arrest Protesters and Eliminate Encampment; Police Appear to Fire Rubber Bullets at UCLA Protesters. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired May 02, 2024 - 08:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[08:01:12]

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

SARA SIDNER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: All right, we begin again with our breaking news at this hour. Across the country, there have been confrontations between protesters, pro-Palestinian protesters, and police, the latest on the campus of UCLA. We have been watching as police have finally moved in, smashing down tents, taking down some of the encampment and arresting those who were inside.

At this hour, we've been watching them move in very quickly. They've been standing there since about 1:00 this morning waiting to push forward after telling the encampment that they were there illegally, the university sending out an alert to students there. The students have been pushing back. We have seen them use, for example, fire extinguishers on police. We have seen them using lights to try to blind the please so that they can't see very well as they're trying to push in on an area that is a little bit smaller than the size of a football field that has been covered with tents and protesters for a week now.

I want to give you a view from just minutes ago as police started pushing in trying to get the pro-Palestinian protester encampment and the protesters out.

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SIDNER: What you are hearing there are flashbangs or stun grenades that the police are deploying. And you're hearing some of the students who were in that encampment yelling as police in a mass move are trying to what is called kettling, trying to get around this protests to try to make it smaller and smaller and smaller so they are pushed into an area where they can then bring them out, detain them using the zip ties that we've been seeing them use throughout the morning. I want to get to our Camila Bernal. She is on the scene there front

and center and has been watching this for hours now. Camila, what can you tell us is happening right now?

CAMILA BERNAL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Sara. We're trying to get as close as possible because those police officers are also making progress and moving into the encampment. You see here behind me all the tents that the police officers were able to push out of the way as they were moving into the encampment, this whole area was part of the encampment. And now what you're seeing is sort of an encircled meant by police officers as they continue to fire these flashbangs in the air to try to disperse the crowd. There are definitely a lot more police officers than protesters are at the moment. It's actually hard to see where these protesters are, but they are in a group in the middle of all of these police officers off to the other side.

What I think is happening is that they're also getting rid of that barrier that those protesters had set up with some of the plywood and the metal barriers, so you're seeing some police presence off in the. You're hearing the group of protesters in the middle still chanting and still very much defiant, despite the fact that they are surrounded by law enforcement officers. We have not seen them move in closer in the last couple of minutes, but again, you just never know when these officers move in closer and closer to give these protesters less room.

[08:05:04]

And then you continue to see people being arrested and being detained and being moved out of this area. We also are seeing a bus ready right next to this area to take a lot of these people that are being detained. So as you're seeing now, these police officers are trying to get some of that garbage, or some of the things that were in the encampment. They are right now moving in closer and closer. You're seeing that happening at the moment as they move out the tents, as they move out all of the things that these protesters had inside of the encampment.

And as they get closer to that group of protesters who are still very much defiant and who are standing in the middle, they are all holding arms, linking arms and trying thank to stay in place as you're seeing more and more of these officers bringing all of these tents out of the encampment.

So again, it has been a very intense morning with a lot of police activity and a lot of protesters who say they're not leaving, who say they still want to be here. Just moments go, I was still seeing a Palestinian flag being waived in the air. But take a look at this. They're taking out bicycles. They're taking out blankets. They're taking out all of the tents and sort of pushing them off to the side as officers make progress and move further and further in. You can clearly see that they have essentially taken over the encampment, the police officers have, as they continue to move further in.

I'm trying to get closer to see the group of protesters who are still surrounded by officers. They're all trying to stay in a group to stay together and stand firm. But it is essentially impossible with the amount of law enforcement officers that you are seeing right now. You hear them shouting and you do hear police officers telling them to move, to move. And clearly they're not doing so, and they're trying to stand there. But there are not many left in terms of what I'm seeing right in front of me. It's a smaller group of protesters who are trying to hold their ground. But again, police officers continue to move in, guys.

SIDNER: Camila Bernal, thank you so much for that, for setting the scene for us this morning. It will be daybreak there and we will be able to see the scene much clearer in just a bit here. But you are describing what is going on on UCLA's campus.

I am standing out in front of Columbia University, which is really the epicenter of where these campus protests began a couple of weeks ago. That went on to UCLA. We are seeing some serious police action there, using sun grenades and all manner of things to try and make this a smaller and smaller and smaller encampment, until they are going to, what it appears, arrest those who are left. We have seen at least a half dozen arrests just in the past 30 minutes from watching the video there where you're seeing them detain protesters.

We also have Ben Camacho who is on the line, a freelance journalist who was there last night as all of this was starting to go down. You said that you were watching this happens of around 5:00. There were police on the scene from several different agencies. And then what? When did you really the police start to move in? Because for a very long time yesterday they were on the outskirts of this encampment, and they were not moving in. They were just sort of holding a line.

BEN CAMACHO, FREELANCE JOURNALIST: Yes, that's correct. So I didn't really see much action from the cops up until maybe 1:30 in the morning when LAPD did break through a small part of the barricade on one side of the camp. And then that's when several hundred protesters did surround the couple dozen LAPD officers who did break through the barricade. That's when protesters also did manage to push those officers out of there encampment and seal the barricade back up.

SIDNER: Do you have any sense, Ben, of the numbers of people, if there were any arrests the night before when there was a battle. There has been a lot of criticism that police were not on campus the night before when you had this clash between the pro-Israeli protesters who ended up attacking those on campus that were part of the pro- Palestinian encampment. We did see people getting beaten up, at least one person was beaten and kicked, kicked and used pipes on them. And so we saw some violence there. Do you have any sense of where that stands and what some of the complaints have been about what happened prior to the police now going into the encampment and trying to clear it.

[08:10:08]

CAMACHO: No, I wasn't there last night. I have just been following the story online. I just know that counter-protesters did attack the camp, and they tried to defend themselves. But when people arrive with pipes, unless you have a pipe or something else, it's kind of hard to defend yourself. So there was bloodshed. And I don't know if anyone has been arrested at this time for that.

SIDNER: Ben Camacho, thank you so much for setting the scene as to how this all went down on UCLA's campus with the brand new police presence that appeared yesterday and is now moving in to try to clear that encampment slowly, but surely. I appreciate you and our Camila Bernal who is on the scene there.

And just to wrap things up, just to give you some sense, we are still watching these pictures of police trying to push in, making the encampment smaller and smaller and getting closer and closer to the core group of protesters who have decided to stay. But as you heard from Camila, the number of Protesters has really diminished. Police have been arresting people throughout the last couple of hours. And we will see what happens as we are continuing to watch this live unfolding in front of our eyes. Guys?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, and we are here and going to continue to keep these pictures up right now. Joining us is our senior law enforcement and terrorism analyst John Miller. You were watching alongside as, John. What do you see here? How would you describe the actions the police have taken? It's really been the last, what, 25 minutes, since they moved around the side of the protesters and began constricting, I guess kettling them in a smaller area.

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: So this has been a deliberately slow motion affair starting yesterday when they chose the forces and the order of deployment, California Highway Patrol in the lead, LAPD and other agencies covering their flank on the perimeter. A series of options in their toolkits. You've seen pepper ball of guns, bean bag shotguns, the kind of less than lethal munitions --

BERMAN: We see rubber bullets on the screen here. Is it rubber bullets, or is it beanbag guns and paintball?

MILLER: It's interchangeable, the terms of art. But these are --

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: This is earlier this morning.

BERMAN: This is tape from earlier, John, just so you know. So we didn't mean to interrupt. So keep going. As the slow-motion movement starting yesterday.

MILLER: They went in with a plan. And what you're looking at here is the result of UCLA believing that they could let this go on for a long time and that it would somehow be easier, and police now saying, well, if we're supposed to resolve this situation right now, we're going to do it in our own way, at our own pace, in our own time, because actually moving in quickly, trying to disperse them quickly trying to do all of this in two hours with the number of people they have would be a mistake.

So they're being very systematic, very methodical. I'm going first to take the barricades, make arrests for people who have been warned under 6407-Aa and 602, the laws of trespassing there, that if you remain here, you're going to be arrested. And you've seen that crowd deplete by people deciding, I'm not going to remain and be arrested, as well as people who are being arrested.

BOLDUAN: How and who decides the line of it's been a legal, lawful, peaceful protest, and it's crossed the line and now police move in. How does this go?

MILLER: So, Kate, fascinating question because it's a tale of two colleges here. At USC, the University of Southern California in L.A., they had a protest set up an encampment and they said, you know, we're going to allow you to be there till the end of the day, and then we're going to come and arrest you. So they were assertive. They were clear in their orders, in their timing, and they did what they said, and that went very peacefully. It was short, it was controlled.

In UCLA's case, they thought, well, it's an encampment. We have plenty of room. It'll be fine. It's a peaceful protest. But then what you saw yesterday, the night before last, was a large group of people came and tried to attack the protesters. And then a pitched battle went on for between two or three hours, depending on how you set the time of when it started and when it finished. The police response was almost nonexistent because when campus security called for the campus police department, and they called for backup from the LAPD, the LAPD said, we're coming in, but we're coming in prepared in riot gear. And they said, well, we don't want that. And they said, well, then if we can't come in prepared the way we dictate tactically, then we are not coming.

[08:15:00]

And then of course, that caused this 90-minute thing that we've all seen on video with them fighting back and forth. That goes to the Governor's Office, right?

This is a state school in the middle of Los Angeles, the state's biggest city and that video played all day and that word came down from the Governor's Office to the college, to we are going to resolve this and we are going to do it, and that's why you see the California Highway Patrol, a state agency taking the lead at a state school because I think Gavin Newsom and the powers that be in Sacramento said this looks really bad and we have to take some kind of action because this isn't going to get better as we let it grow.

It is going to get more complicated.

BERMAN: And it is important to note that UCLA, we are looking at right now is a public university. So the law actually is a little bit different on these grounds, than it would be at USC or at Columbia where we've seen before private universities --

BOLDUAN: Fordham. I mean, Fordham in New York yesterday...

BERMAN: Fordham is a private university.

BOLDUAN: .. that happened.

BERMAN: So free speech rules and certain barriers don't have had to be met if the colleges want to have them dispersed quickly, UCLA a little bit of a different ball game.

Sarah Sidner is watching this along with us and I know Sara has a question for John.

SIDNER: John, only you would know that the California Penal Code 602 K for trespass. So kudos to you for knowing all of the details there being a New York guy.

I do want to ask you about comparing and contrasting because John is bringing up, you know, all of these other places where we have seen these arrests.

In Wisconsin, we saw battles between police and protesters. That never looks good to the public when you see students and police sort of in a battle.

We saw the same thing at UT Austin with professors complaining about the heavy-handed tactics they thought had happened on that campus, and then you saw what happened here at Columbia where police went in en masse to try to get protesters out of Hamilton Hall here in Columbia.

Can you compare and contrast what you're seeing here compared to what you've been seeing across the country with how police have dealt with this versus what you're seeing at UCLA, which seems to be much slower and much worth methodical.

MILLER: So New York is unique in that they have 35,000 police officers. The idea that they were able to amass a thousand or more to handle the Columbia situation, was based in the idea, if that you show up with overwhelming show of force, you probably won't have to use force and they didn't.

There was, I think, out of 282 arrests, there was one injury to one person and that is remarkable. And the situation where you're taking that many people into custody.

In Los Angeles, you've only got 9,200 or so police officers for a city half the size of New York with a third larger geography, so that makes deployment decisions much more difficult where you can't really call up a thousand cops and say, if we need another thousand, we will just call them.

So what you see is a carefully stitched together mutual aid program where its California State Highway Patrol, its LAPD, its Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and all the cities around it contributing people, it makes command and control a little more difficult because it is not one agency one set of orders, but you do have the incident command system where there is an incident commander who is calling the shots and everybody is going to toe that line.

So one of the reasons they are going so slowly is, they know the numbers of people that they have on the other side of those barricades, they know the numbers of people they brought and frankly, speed here is not on their side.

This methodical approach is going to allow them to go slower, but ultimately to use less force.

BOLDUAN: We are continuing to watch these live pictures out of Los Angeles on UCLA's campus. John Miller is standing by with us.

We are going to be right back after this.

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[08:23:53]

SIDNER: We continue with our breaking news for you. This morning, we are watching with eagle eyes the University of California of Los Angeles, UCLA. There are protesters who are facing off with police who had been in an encampment for about a week now. Police closing in on the few protesters who are left at this hour.

We have seen arrests throughout the morning. We have seen flashbangs going off. We have seen protesters responding with sort of shining lights in police eyes as they are trying to cattle them, trying to bring them into a much smaller space as they go forward, tearing down tents and tearing apart the encampment, while also arresting those who are taking part in it.

We know that there had been students there, but there have also been professors who have been inside that encampment as well. And I do want to talk to one professor who has been on campus, Nir Hoftman, he is a UCLA clinical professor of anesthesiology. He was on the ground yesterday.

Professor, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Can you give me a sense of what the students are saying as you sort of watch all of this unfold. Can you give us a sense of what students have been saying over the past couple of days?

[08:25:07]

NIR HOFTMAN, UCLA CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF ANESTHESIOLOGY: Well, I am not in direct contact with undergraduate students, so I can only comment on what I have seen either on TV or while I was there. But most of the students want to have nothing to do with this mess. They just want to go to school, take their tests, graduate.

There are some very extreme students that are treating this as if it is a political protest, but there is a lot of violence going on there.

SIDNER: There were some violence that broke out two nights ago that everyone was watching as they had pro-Israeli protesters attacking the pro-Palestinian protesters and then it was going back and forth and eventually police showed up.

Can you give me some sense of what the university is looking into now, is there investigation into what has happened on campus? And what do you know about that, if anything?

HOFTMAN: Well, I just want to update your on the narrative here. The violence didn't start Tuesday night. The violence began as soon as this protest arrived.

The day that the USC protest was shut down was the day that four giant buses arrived with people that we have no idea who they are, who came in and together with some students started to set up this encampment, which grew.

By Friday, I went down there and I reported on the fact that Jewish students and really anybody that didn't agree with the purpose of this protest were being harassed, bullied, intimidated, physically assaulted. There was a counterprotest actually on Sunday, which was an organized permitted protests by supporters of Israel and Jewish students and that protest was basically attacked by the Palestinian protesters. So there was -- and many people were injured.

So the violence really didn't start Tuesday night. It had been going on for days and days. What happened Tuesday is despicable. People that we don't know who they are basically came in and created a war zone and that is what happens when there is no law and order.

I went to the police on Friday, and again on Monday and begged them to go up there because I myself was assaulted on Monday when I was giving an interview, and the police basically told me straight out that they have been given an order not to go up there directly by the leadership of the university.

SIDNER: So it sounds to me like, first of all, can you tell us what happened to you when you were attacked, A, and B, it sounds to me that this has been going back and forth and back and forth. The latest thing that we saw, violence was on two nights ago, however, you're saying this has been going on for a while.

So what are your thoughts about how the university and police have handled this? Because it sounds to me like you are very disappointed with how this has been handled on both ends of the spectrum.

HOFTMAN: So with regard to my attack, I was actually walking in towards the quad while giving a Zoom interview. Some thugs donning Palestinian Keffiyehs basically told me to stop walking and that I am not allowed to go there.

I tried to ignore them and walked around them, one of them tackled me to the ground. My ear pod flew out. Apparently, he stole it because I tracked it later into their quad, and when I went and filed the police report and told the police I can track them, I know exactly where he is, please go and arrest him. They basically told me, we are not going to go in there to save your ear pod.

We had a private security guard that got kidnapped and put into that encampment. He was an old man who was injured, pepper sprayed, beat up, and we barely got him out.

Now, yes, I am very disappointed in the police response, but I don't blame the police. I mean, the police put out a statement basically stating that they are not responsible because they take orders from the leadership of the university. The leadership of the university did not want to do anything about this, and in fact, I believe that it wasn't the melee that broke out Tuesday night that made them decide to disband this.

I think they already made the decision earlier on Tuesday, which is why they issued a statement that the encampment is illegal. They decided to break down the encampment when they got called in front of Congress to testify, May 23rd. That's I think what led them to finally shut this down.

SIDNER: You think that's what sparked that, something other than the violence that we all saw breakout two nights ago.

I do want to further ask you, what has been the sentiment of Jewish students on campus, because you talked about your experience, you talked about the fear that maybe welling up there.

Have you heard from Jewish students on campus and how they are sort of dealing with this? I know we are in that sort of week or two of finals and then there is going to be commencement. But give me some sense of what you're hearing from those students.

[08:30:16]