C-U Pro-Palestine Activists Aggressively Overcharged with Mob Action
The wave of pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses has subsided, but in Champaign-Urbana a group of students and community members remain in the courts for felony mob action charges. A student-led protest at the University of Illinois this past spring was not much different than what was happening across the country. What is out of the ordinary is the aggressive overcharging of the nine student and community activists who are being threatened with prison time.
The University of Illinois administration may have been aggravated by students defiantly putting up tents on campus and destroying the grass. Some big donors might have been upset by the 5k run that was cancelled because the mass police presence at the encampment left nobody to handle street traffic. Still, this doesn’t fully explain the heavy-handed response.
I was on campus the day of the encampment, I talked to protesters, I even helped to bail one of them out of jail. Everything I heard was that the encampment was entirely spontaneous, an unplanned action by a few groups who came together after being horrified by the military assault on Palestinians and watching protests spread on college campuses. This was not a mob, and there was no coordinated action.
Divest
On April 17, 2024, protests began at Columbia University in New York where an encampment of about 50 tents was set up by students who called on the administration to divest from its investments in Israel. The next day the NYPD moved in and arrested around 100 people, with the story making national news. Over the coming weeks, similar encampments sprung up around the country and internationally.
Just nine days after incidents at Columbia, on Friday, April 26, a couple tents were erected in the early morning hours at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus, next to Alma Mater. Police moved in around 8:20 a.m. to remove the tents. From what I saw watching video feed on social media, activists were non-violent, only the police were physical and aggressive.
Campus workers were called out to take down the tents after police broke through a line of protesters. SEIU, the union representing the Building and Food Service Workers, sent a cease-and-desist letter to the university. The union was “shocked” that its workers were used to “suppress free speech in a potentially illegal action of an overtly political nature.”
The encampment grew throughout the day, with police assaulting the crowd again around 4 p.m. in the afternoon. Two activists were arrested, one in the morning and another in the afternoon. After being booked into the jail, one was bailed out Saturday morning, and the other did not get out of jail until Monday afternoon.
A larger confrontation came that night when police from at least five different departments — University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign, Mohamet, and Champaign County Sheriff’s Office — descended on protesters, carrying large cans of mace, and threatening the crowd. MTD buses were on the scene for mass arrests. Negotiations took place and the arrests were narrowly avoided.
A 5k race with the Illinois Marathon scheduled for Friday night was cancelled. Police were tied up with quelling protests and unable to redirect street traffic. A report found that local police claimed $137,000 in overtime pay that day.
As part of an agreement with the administration, activists moved the encampment to the lawn of the Krannert Center. On Sunday, April 28, the encampment was moved to the U of I Quad where it remained until the end of the spring semester with a dozen or so tents. Free food was distributed and teach-ins were held.
Prosecutorial Discretion
As the New York Times reported, 3,100 people were arrested this past spring during protests, but most of the charges have since been dropped. After the news cycle passed and students emptied out of C-U, Notices to Appear (NTAs) in court were quietly sent out to additional demonstrators. In June, University of Police started delivering NTAs for Class C misdemeanor mob action charges. When activists got to court, they learned that State’s Attorney Julia Rietz had upped the charges to Class 4 felonies for mob action.
During an appearance on WDWS, conservative talk radio station, Rietz said that the University of Illinois police made a mistake, “the subsection that they cited wasn’t the right one.” But she also claimed the charges were “entirely the prosecutor’s discretion.”
This is also a tactic commonly used by prosecutors, and often practiced by Rietz, of “overcharging.” The intent is to stack charges against an individual to intimidate them into accepting a plea bargain. In my years of reporting, I’ve spoken with numerous Black residents of C-U who know this strategy all too well, which is why our jails and prisons are filled with African Americans.
Whether the felony mob action charges were pursued at the request of the University of Illinois or the decision of State’s Attorney Rietz is still uncertain.
No Tents Allowed
College campuses, from the University of California to the University of Pennsylvania, are changing their policies to ban tents and prevent further encampments. The University of Illinois has quietly rewritten its policy over the summer to prohibit tents. While the old policy bans camping, the new rules explicitly state that unauthorized tents are “subject to removal.” The Graduate Employees’ Union Organization (GEO) put out a statement condemning the policy as “repressive.” The language about tent removal is, “clearly in response to the spring encampment for Gaza.”
The UIUC policy also requires that anyone on campus produce their full name, university affiliation, and identification if they are suspected of violating university policy. This means that any community members who do not produce an I-Card can be kicked off campus for a widening array of policy violations.
“This creates a divide,” the GEO statement says, “between our state-funded university and our surrounding community. This ultimately results in a gated community that harms campus-community relations.”
The university has enforced these policies by stripping Students for Justice in Palestine of their status as a registered student organization.
The backlash has not discouraged activists from continuing to bring attention to Palestine. The first week of classes, protesters chalked “DIVEST” on the columns of Foellinger Auditorium, a clear violation of university policy.