Videos posted on social media Thursday morning showed police officers using what appears to be a stun gun on a protester and throwing protesters to the ground at Emory University during an “encampment for Gaza” demonstration. In other videos, loud pops can be heard and people are seen coughing and washing their eyes out with water. The student newspaper, The Emory Wheel, reported that the police had “released irritant gas” to disperse the protest.
The protest was one of dozens that have cropped up on college campuses across the country since Columbia University called in the police to clear an encampment one week ago. The protesters, who are mostly students and are sometimes joined by faculty members and others, are demanding that their colleges divest from companies selling weapons to Israel as it wages a war that has killed tens of thousands in Gaza. The war followed the killing of over 1,000 Israelis by Hamas on October 7.
According to the first of two statements from Emory’s spokesperson, the protesters on that campus were “not members of our community.” The statement said they had set up tents on the campus quad early Thursday morning.
“They are activists attempting to disrupt our university as our students finish classes and prepare for finals,” the statement Laura Diamond sent to The Chronicle said. “Emory does not tolerate vandalism or other criminal activity on campus. The Emory Police Department ordered the group to leave and contacted Atlanta Police and Georgia State Patrol for assistance.”
A second statement, sent later in the day, said that “the activists who initially gathered were not recognized as members of our community.” The second statement said that the “Emory Police issued multiple warnings asking the crowd to disperse. When those requests were ignored, Atlanta Police and Georgia State Patrol assisted Emory Police with clearing the Quad.” The university was not able to say how many people were taken into custody or whether anyone had been charged.
Emory’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, echoed the first statement’s language in an email to the university quoted by the Wheel. In that message, he wrote that the demonstrators were “largely not affiliated” with the university. (Before he was Emory’s president, Fenves led the University of Texas at Austin; on Wednesday, that campus also enlisted the police to forcibly clear an encampment.)
Some of the videos seemed to contradict the assertion that the protesters did not include members of the Emory community. In one video, a person shouts, “I go to this school,” while an officer puts their hands in zip ties. “I have a right to be here,” the person screams.
The Wheel quoted a professor as saying there were “numerous students” at the demonstration.
Students have been arrested at many of the campus demonstrations in the last week, including at the University of Southern California and Emerson College, in Boston. Often they are held and then released without charges.
But the arrests at Emory were among the most violent captured on video. In one video that was posted to X (warning: graphic violence), a person is held to the ground by several officers while another officer appears to hold a stun gun against their leg. In another video, a student identifies themself as an Emory senior who was tear-gassed while trying to leave the protest. That student describes the protest as peaceful, saying the protesters were chanting and some tried to march before the police arrived. In several videos, police officers can be seen struggling with protesters and carrying some off the lawn.
