It’s the charge of the trash brigade!
Anti-Israel protesters at Portland State University (PSU) burst from the campus library Thursday morning in a rag-tag phalanx of bicycle helmets and makeshift shields fashioned from trash bins during a crackdown by police.
But, despite their battle cries, they were quickly thwarted by waiting cops, according to footage captured by KGW8.
Some managed to scurry away and avoid arrest, footage appeared to show, while others were grabbed and slammed to the ground after attempting to ram through a line of cops.
The protestors — who would have left riders of the Light Brigade shaking their heads — had occupied PSU’s Brandford Miller Library since Monday, prompting the campus to close for three straight days. Police finally began breaching the library first thing Thursday morning.
Once inside cops found an arsenal of what appeared to be makeshift weapons and armor, including buckets of ball bearings, paint-filled balloons, and cups of dish soap alongside a note reading “Throw down stairs if cops come up.”
Of the 12 people who were arrested, only four were confirmed as students, KGW8 reported.
The crackdown at Portland State followed an early-morning raid by police on violent anti-Israel protesters at University of Southern California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Encampments at colleges across the country came crashing down Thursday as police finally descended and made sweeping arrests.
At UCLA, at least 132 demonstrators were arrested during the raid, which came hours after the barricaded encampment — which was staffing its own security around the perimeters — refused to disperse Wednesday evening.
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The California Highway Patrol closed in around 3 a.m. armed with smoke grenades, rubber bullets, and flashbangs as they dismantled the camp which had become the sight of several unruly incidents since it went up.
Though the protestors are gone, the trashed remains of their encampment were left behind blotting out the typically vibrant green of the quad — forcing workers to come in and haul away heaps of garbage, structural debris used as barriers, and countless battered tents where the protestors had been living.
The scenes at PSU and UCLA mirrored the chaos that unfolded at Columbia University in NYC days earlier in the week, after the NYPD finally descended on demonstrators who had also holed themselves up in a building on campus.
More than 100 people were arrested after the raid on Tuesday night, which involved officers breaching the upper floor windows of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, battering down blocked doors, and dismantling barricades erected out of classroom furniture.
About 20 blocks north at City College, more were taken into custody resulting in about 280 arrests across both schools.
There were at least 47 non-students among the arrests.
Not all encampments ended in chaos, however.
At Brown University, demonstrators and administrators came to an agreement Tuesday to disband the camp through the end of the school year in return for a May sit down with the school’s governing body to discuss their demands that the school divest itself from any association with businesses “enabling and profiting from the genocide in Gaza,” according to Axios.
The results of their discussions will be put to a vote in October, according to the agreement.