Dear, Governor Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Letitia James, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, NYC Police Chief John Chell, NYC Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch,
I write in regard to a criminal incident that occurred at Barnard College on Wednesday, February 26. During a violent student takeover of Millbank Hall, a 41-year-old Barnard College Safety Officer became a victim of Second-Degree Assault. The perpetrators of this violent assault and the associated building takeover are students of Barnard College and Columbia University; all of whom attempted to conceal their identities by wearing masks, balaclavas and keffiyehs.(1) The victim was at his post on duty at Millbank Hall on Campus when the group of student perpetrators surged into the building through a two-door entrance. The Safety Officer who was standing just outside the entrance and was forcefully pinned against a vertical beam separating two doors by the perpetrators. One perpetrator lowered his shoulder and slammed into the Safety Officer’s body like a linebacker. This violent act could have had no other goal but to inflict bodily harm. This clearly constituted a violent attack against a Law Enforcement Officer and thus is likely a Class D felony- second-degree assault against a protected victim. It may also entail a Class B felony if the “take-over” of Millbank Hall itself is deemed an underlying criminal act.(2)
Shortly after the incident, the Safety Officer experienced chest tightness, shortness of breath, and soreness in his neck and body. He requested medical attention and was taken to a hospital for evaluation where he was released after treatment. Barnard Safety Officers are members of the Transit Workers Union. TWU International President John Samuelsen said. “Those responsible for this assault should be identified and prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg...”
How can it be that the New York City District Attorney has not yet filed charges against the student perpetrators who have now upped their ante by deploying criminal violence as a means to their political ends of creating a Palestinian state and erasing the existing sovereign state of Israel. Local TWU 264 President Joseph Rose expressed “deep concern and outrage” in an email to Barnard College President Laura Rosenbury. He stated, “I pray it doesn’t take something catastrophic to happen before Barnard addresses these concerns that we at the TWU have continuously raised through Labor Management Committees and various other meetings.” (3)
Regardless of Barnard’s failure to act, it is no longer the duty of its university administrators to solve the problem of their student’s abhorrent behavior. That “behavior”- as of Wednesday afternoon - mutated into felonious criminal acts that endangered lives in New York City. As such, it is Alvin Braggs’, Letitia James’ and the New York Police Department’s duty to solve the behavior problem. It is your duty to investigate, and to prosecute the protestors who on Wednesday collectively and individually morphed into violent criminals. It was one thing when they were simply protesting and expressing their protected political views loudly – if sophomorically - to affect the political changes they desire. It became altogether something else when they replaced their right to free expression of political views with violence as a means to affect political change. That is called anarchy and terrorism and there is no place for it in New York; be it on Barnard’s campus or anywhere else.
For years Barnard College and Columbia University leadership have clung to the false and extraordinarily self-indulgent belief that disciplining their students was beneath them and a tedious distraction from their institution’s lofty focus on the life of the mind and an improper intrusion into academic freedom. To be sure, they are wrong, and their blindness will surely do enormous damage to their institutions.
Has academic freedom been so distorted that it is now deployed as both a shield and a sword to perpetrate violence on campus if that violence can be intellectually justified as a form of political resistance? If one is an Ivy League university student or professor, does one have a free pass to cause bodily harm to working-class New Yorkers in the name of justice for Palestine and other causes?
The student activist-protestors who took over Millbank Hall, engaged in criminality, and committed a felonious assault against a Barnard employee. They must be prosecuted for it. If they are found guilty, they will serve a 2 to 7-year prison sentence at another famed - if less prestigious – New York institution; Rikers Island. Perhaps they will learn a few lessons about law, justice and civility at Rikers Island that Barnard seems either unable or unwilling to teach.
The New York Attorney General, the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Police Department must investigate and if warranted, they must prosecute. To do otherwise is to send a message that criminality perpetrated by a privileged few will be ignored as long as that criminal behavior happens within the ivy-covered buildings of New York’s most prestigious universities.
Alvin Bragg, Letitia James and the NYPD are all responsible for upholding the laws of the State of New York. As such, they should not and cannot ignore – as the Barnard and Columbia leaders have - that a mob of masked violent students concealed their identities, broke into Millbank Hall, assaulted a 41-year-old employee, and then demanded that Barnard College reverse its expulsion of two former-students who a few weeks earlier had violated the College’s policies when they barged into a classroom wearing keffiyehs and masks and proceeded to take over a class, its Professor (who was teaching a seminar class on the history of Israel), and his students in order to publicize the demand that Palestine be “set free”. What part of this sad saga is not criminal? Which perpetrators in these events should not be punished to the fullest extent of the law and why not?
It is now time for these criminals to defend their felonious behavior in a court of law before a judge and jury.
Sincerely,
Adam Drisin
(2) https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/120.05
(3) https://www.twu.org/barnard-college-assault/