On April 30th, as dozens of Yale University students started the second day of their encampment to demand that the university divest from weapons manufacturing, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s New Haven office, Jennifer Wagner, sent an email to Yale Police Department (YPD) Chief Anthony Campbell. “The FBI has been monitoring the widespread protests related to the Israel/Hamas conflict at several colleges and universities,” she wrote, adding “if needed, FBI New Haven stands ready to provide support to you and your educational institutions” and “feel free to contact me either by cell or email should you need anything from the FBI.” Just two days later, the YPD—the university’s 93-officer-strong private security force that possesses law enforcement powers—appeared to have taken Wagner up on her offer, enlisting the help of the FBI to investigate a pro-Palestine student who was accused of poking a counter-protesting Zionist student in the eye with a flag. As one YPD detective wrote to a sergeant, describing the results of the collaboration, the “FBI [was] in possession” of the accused student’s cell phone after he had been “located by video” and “tracked to his apartment,” which was then searched under a warrant.
Emails with the FBI were just some of the 1,936 files Yale handed over in a settlement agreement to close out a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit I filed in late May 2024, which together document the university’s repressive strategy in dealing with pro-Palestine students. The documents reveal that the YPD installed cameras on campus, tracked students’ social media accounts, and monitored students using aerial drones. Additionally, the YPD also collaborated with the New Haven Police Department, other university police, pro-Israel organizations, and even a federal counterterrorism intelligence-sharing center in its effort to crack down on protest. Along the way, YPD officers repeatedly denigrated students they ostensibly work to protect: In one May 4th email, YPD Assistant Chief of Police Von Narcisse called the protesters “pathetic and sad,” with Campbell replying: “I agree 100 percent. There [sic] actions are like a small group of vandals and criminals rather than protesters.” (The YPD and Yale leadership did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
For decades, university police forces have been expanding: As of 2015, 75% of campuses were using armed officers. These police departments have also rapidly militarized, with over a hundred participating in the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which facilitates the transfer of military surplus equipment to police forces. Amid the nationwide outcry over police brutality in 2020, several universities, including Yale, pledged to rein in their police departments’ more aggressive practices. But with the clampdown on pro-Palestine protests, such attempts at restraint appear to have been short lived. “The [FOIA] documents really opened all of our eyes to the incredibly intense militarization of campus police forces,” said Naima Blanco-Norberg, one of the leaders of Yalies4Palestine—Yale’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine—after reviewing the documents. Sabiya Ahmed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, added that the “intense surveillance of students in the movement for Palestine” documented in the files is an attempt to “make students feel like they are doing something wrong, even criminal, by speaking up against genocide and for Palestinian rights”—all of which “can have a chilling effect” on future protest.
The powers of many campus police departments, including the YPD, are significant. The department is empowered to file charges against and arrest Yale students as well as New Haven residents; indeed, in 2008 the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission decided that these abilities are expansive enough to make Yale a public agency subject to the disclosure of documents in the public interest under the state’s FOIA. Yet, as the hundreds of emails disclosed to me under this provision show, YPD leadership was keen to use their department’s public powers to advance Yale’s private aims, basing enforcement decisions on administrators’ instructions, and at times, direct pressure from Zionist activists. For instance, after receiving nine emails in half an hour from pro-Israel individuals complaining about a mural of Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqa, who died in Israeli captivity this year, the YPD immediately began trying to identify the mural’s location. In an email to a colleague sent on April 17th, the night the first Columbia University encampment was cleared, Narcisse touted this hands-on approach to campus policing, writing, “The difference between Columbia and us is that we have a legit police force, ready to go, 24-7. We don’t need to, and won’t, wait for law enforcement capabilities to mobilize; we can and will do it ourselves, swiftly. Jail awaits criminal violations such as what we see in Columbia. Zero tolerance and rapid consequences for lawlessness.”
To achieve these aims, the YPD invested heavily in monitoring student organizations’ activities throughout the spring. Soon after the first pro-Palestine encampment was established on April 19th, the YPD discussed adding and repositioning on-campus cameras to provide a better vantage point to observe the students’ setup. Additionally, numerous aerial photos as well as emails about drone training and use reveal that Yale also utilized an advanced drone surveillance program to watch protesters. Specifically, drone flight logs show that Yale is in possession of an arsenal of at least three drones, one of which is a military-grade weapon manufactured by Skydio—a company that sold at least 100 drones to the Israeli army in the weeks following October 7th, 2023. YPD officers also discussed reviewing footage of protesters from New Haven Police Department drones. The goal of this monitoring appears to have been twofold: first, to assess the body count of each instance of protest to be able to deploy the right number of officers to handle it, and secondly, to assemble dossiers on suspected students with which to later punish them. The YPD also used information like suspected students’ swipe history—which recorded the buildings and times at which IDs were scanned—to this end. In an April 29th email, YPD officer Christopher Confrancesco wrote to Campbell, “Attached is one of the individuals, which we identified, you had an interaction with on 04-28-2024 on Cross Campus. ID swipes were pulled for Berkeley College south after the individual was seen on video swiping in.” Yale appears to have used a combination of such tactics to identify the student against whom it chose to pursue charges for letting down an American flag from its central flagpole during a protest: The school’s dossier on the individual included surveillance photos from inside campus buildings and swipe records.
In addition to monitoring ongoing protests, the YPD also tried to preempt upcoming ones by closely tracking students’ social media posts. Many of the email exchanges between YPD Compliance and Crime Analyst Vanessa Schencking and department leadership contain screenshots of Instagram posts by pro-Palestine student groups. In one instance, YPD officers—increasingly concerned about a potential disruption to the school’s annual “Spring Fling” concert, for which Yale budgets $345,000 each year—extracted a list of Yalies4Palestine’s followers on Instagram and compared it to a list of registrants to the concert out of fear protesters would smuggle in outside reinforcements to campus. “Tactically, if the [student] groups anticipate police presence at the train and bus stations,” wrote YPD Director of Compliance and Strategic Initiatives Lisa Skelly-Byrnes in an email to an unidentified Yale administrator sent the day before the concert, “they would be wise to [pre-position] people on campus, possibly under the guise of attending Spring Fling.” Skelly-Byrnes suggested that police respond by “look[ing] for possible staging areas and possible prepositioning of any assets before the event on Sunday.” In anticipating the disruption, which never ultimately materialized, Skelly-Byrnes was particularly concerned at the collaboration between groups like Yalies4Palestine, Yale Jews for Ceasefire, and Occupy Yale; on a later occasion, she explicitly named that this was because the groups’ posts show “the power of the movement, how it is growing, and the solidarity. Many different groups and ideologies are blending and joining forces.”
The YPD’s response to students likewise drew on collaboration with allied groups. In discussing the students’ social media accounts in the aforementioned message, Skelly-Byrnes noted that “we attended an [International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators] webinar yesterday and the UNH (New Hampshire) chief stated that the groups on his campus have moved to more secure communications such as messenger, text message, and telegram”—revealing the YPD’s collaboration with other university police in developing its monitoring tactics. The files also reveal that the YPD was in touch with pro-Israel and conservative activist groups as they dealt with the protests. Throughout the spring, YPD officers received briefings from the Secure Community Network—a project of Hillel International that, according to its website, uses its “direct line to the Federal Bureau of Investigation” to address “potential threats” to Jews, often focusing on pro-Palestine activism. The Network reached out directly to the YPD, as well as the FBI, after the video of the “eye poking” was posted on social media; Campbell replied that the YPD was working on identifying those involved, and added, “I will keep you posted with any updates as we make progress.” Additionally, Campbell attended events with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in April, continuing his involvement with the group from 2018, when he was widely criticized for attending an ADL-sponsored training in Israel. Skelly-Byrnes also attended a May training with the ultraconservative Legal Insurrection Foundation, titled “Who is funding anti-Israel campus protests?”; speakers at the event argued that pro-Palestine protests in the US were likely being fueled by foreign terrorist organizations and governments, including Iran. (Even before attending the training, Skelly-Byrnes was already making similar insinuations about students, writing in the April 26th email about hypothetical Spring Fling protests: “Just thinking about the tents -who bring tents and sleeping bags to college...in a city? I am questioning funding and outside influences.”)
The files show that the YPD also participated in the Connecticut Intelligence Center (CIC), which is a fusion center—a body founded in the wake of 9/11 that brings local, state, and federal law enforcement together with public and private institutions to share information on ongoing counterterrorism investigations. Fusion centers have been widely accused of wrongfully targeting peace activists and communities of color, including during the 2020 protests for racial justice when the American Civil Liberties Union wrote that the centers “targeted and disseminated intelligence reports on protesters and protest activity, as well as individuals based on their beliefs, religion, race, or ethnicity . . . without any connection to actual wrongdoing.” Throughout the spring, the YPD received situational awareness bulletins and participated in intelligence sharing with the CIC. Mohammad Tajsar, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said this collaboration with a fusion center “is an extraordinarily worrying development, as it signals that campus police departments are taking on a more frontline role in responding to protests—something which university administrators are egging on across the country, and which will inevitably result in additional violence and criminalization.”
Like the YPD, other university police departments across the country have also used intensive surveillance tactics, heavy force, and multi-agency collaboration to respond to pro-Palestine student protests. At Emory, campus police officers worked with Atlanta police and state troopers to clear the students’ encampment in the spring, resulting in police throwing detainees to the ground and using Tasers and pepper balls on protesters. In July, the University of North Carolina Police Department obtained a search warrant to seize data from the UNC Students for Justice in Palestine Instagram account, as reported by Mondoweiss. More recently, according to reports in The Intercept, police at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University—in collaboration with local police, as well as, in the latter case, the FBI—conducted raids on apartments and homes of students suspected of vandalism without showing warrants. Some campus forces are also further militarizing in advance of future protests: In September, for instance, regents at the University of California system approved the purchase of “3,000 rounds of pepper munitions, 500 rounds of 40mm impact munitions, 12 drones, and nine less-lethal launchers across six University of California campuses,” according to the Los Angeles Public Press. Against this backdrop, the Yale files document the mechanics of campus militarization—and its many dangers for student protesters. “It’s a sad day in America when institutions of higher learning become the playgrounds of military weapons,” Tajsar said, “turning places where young people think and learn to some kind of disturbing video game for overzealous campus police officers.”