GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Police supported by state troopers arrested nine pro-Palestinian protesters late Monday who had occupied a plaza on the University of Florida for days. They were among the first college arrests in Florida.
Campus police Sgt. Courtney Marie Burgoyne said officers arrested nine protesters, who were led away in handcuffs. It followed the arrest of three other protesters at the University of South Florida in Tampa hours earlier.
The administration at Florida’s flagship public university said in a statement the protesters had violated new rules announced last week that included “no disruptions” and a ban on camping, sleeping, bullhorns and tents – but it didn’t immediately say exactly what the protesters were accused of doing wrong. A spokesman, Steve Orlando, declined Monday night to answer questions about the arrests.
“I do not have to tell you anything,” an unidentified campus police officer told a protester at the scene. About 30 protesters remained after the arrests. Some shouted “shame” and “who do you protect?” at officers and troopers.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether anyone who was arrested was a student or otherwise affiliated with the university.
Under the university’s new rules, students who violate them will be suspended, and employees or professors would be fired.
In a statement emailed to reporters 16 minutes after the arrests, Orlando said police gave the protesters “multiple warnings and multiple opportunities to comply” before they were arrested.
“This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children – they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences,” Orlando said in the statement. “For many days, we have patiently told protesters – many of whom are outside agitators – that they were able to exercise their right to free speech and free assembly.”
The arrests occurred about 7:40 p.m. Monday on the school’s Plaza of the Americas, the centrally located square in the heart of campus. Law enforcement officers – including about 15 campus and municipal police officers and about six Florida Highway Patrol troopers – marched toward the plaza and protesters with batons in hand.
Police appeared to shut off power in the area during the arrests then restored it immediately afterward.
Last week was the last day of regularly scheduled classes for the semester. Some students were finishing final exams this week.
Sunday night, as police explained the university’s new rules to protesters, some of them criticized officers and compared them to members of the white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Israeli Defense Force: “IDF, KKK, UFPD, you’re all the same,” protesters chanted as someone beat on a drum.
This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
They’re shifting blame from the people who voted for Hamas in 2006, then let Hamas stop future elections so they could spend resources building tunnels and a terror org.
I just had my second cup of coffee and this absolutely made my day! Well don UF and LEOs. These educated idiots hide behind their little masks and wear tbeir headresses as if they are right out of Gaza but in reality are just paid protestors. I sincelely hope the charges will not be dropped and that the UF Disciplinary Board will not go soft. Most of the UF students are good people and just trying to get an education and move on in life and they deserve that opportunity.
Those nuts should be barred from campus for 5 years.
As a young reporter, learning my way around a microphone and Royal typewriter for Gainesville’s venerable WDVH Radio, I covered two nights of unrest on and around the UF campus that saw more than a thousand people hauled to the pokey. Demonstrators, the vast majority of them UF students, had blocked 13th Street with a sit-down. The disruption brought state troopers and police from all over, and even a TV news photographer from the big city of Jacksonville. There was tear gas, zip cuffs, the occasional busted head. It was the kind of thing that can happen when people choose to express a point of view that others find objectionable in a way that others find objectionable. Like the folks who walked across that bridge in Alabama, those who put down their pick axes at the Kentucky coal mines, a guy named Ghandi who suffered salt in his wounds, the tea dumpers in Boston. None of that happened in a daycare. For an institution of higher education to suggest it did would be, well, childish.
Are you suggesting these actions are portentous of a righteous revolution?
Florida’s institutions love fascism and hate freedom of speech 🖤
Anyone who supports arresting these protestors while not decrying UF’s support for literal white supremacists speaking on campus, isn’t just a hypocrite; they’re a bootlicker.