UCLA slammed for 'chaotic' response to violent protest melee in UC independent review

Police officers clash with pro-Palestinian protesters as a fire extinguisher is deployed at UCLA on May 2.

Nov. 14, 2024 Updated 9:31 PM PT

UCLA failed to protect students from protest fallout in spring because of “chaotic” decision making and other shortcomings, an independent review found.
UCLA should develop a detailed incident response plan, designate a commander, improve police coordination.

UCLA failed to protect students from a protest melee this spring because a “highly chaotic” decision-making process, lack of communication among campus leaders and police, and other shortfalls led to institutional paralysis, according to a University of California independent review released Thursday.

The highly anticipated review, conducted by a national law enforcement consulting agency, found myriad failures and breakdowns by UCLA administrators and police after pro-Palestinian students set up a late April encampment, which drew complaints of antisemitic behavior. The encampment came under a violent attack by counterprotesters in early May, fomenting widespread outrage and attention.

The review found that UCLA had no detailed plan for handling major protests, even as problems were “reasonably foreseeable” as encampments springing up at other campuses were drawing at times violent conflict. UCLA leaders had not identified who should control decision-making and at times shut out campus police from meetings.

For their part, campus police had no effective plan to work with external law enforcement and failed to take command on the night of the melee — leading the LAPD and the California Highway Patrol to devise an ad-hoc response, the review said.

“Because no codified plans existed, UCLA administrators engaged in a chaotic process in which they needed to make difficult decisions ... in the midst of ongoing disruption, without clarity on who maintained final decision-making authority, lacking a commonly understood process for reaching decisions, and largely lacking the ability to react quickly to fast-changing events and dynamic circumstances on campus,” the report by 21st Century Policing Solutions concluded.

UCLA, in a response late Thursday, said it was committed to campus safety and would learn from the events of this spring.

“We appreciate the work that went into producing the report, and will continue to implement the recommended reforms — many of which are already underway,” the university statement said.

A call for reforms

The review recommended that UCLA take key actions:

Develop a detailed response plan
Provide better training of civilian staff and police
Increase real-time communications about campus disruptions
Hire more civilians to help mediate conflicts before law enforcement is called in

The report was based on tens of thousands of documents and interviews with current and former UCLA administrators, faculty, staff, students and law enforcement over five months. It comes after two other major reports criticized UCLA for its protest response.

A report to the Los Angeles Police Commission found a confusing breakdown in coordinating actions among UCLA, the LAPD, California Highway Patrol and smaller municipal police agencies that were hastily called to campus in the spring. The Republican-led U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce also criticized UCLA and other elite universities, including Harvard and Columbia, for “dramatic failures in confronting antisemitism.”

UC President Michael V. Drake said in a statement Thursday that the goal of the UCLA review was to learn what reforms were needed to prevent a recurrence of the shortcomings, while safeguarding campus health and safety, equal access to educational facilities and 1st Amendment rights to free speech.

“Last spring, as conflict spread at universities across the country, we saw the limits of our traditional approach,” Drake said. “We are taking a close, detailed look at where we fell short and how we can do better moving forward. This comprehensive review and these recommendations will help ensure that we have actionable plans and policies in place to prevent similar events from happening again.”

Drake noted that UCLA has started making changes, including launching some of the actions recommended by the consulting group. They include setting up an Office of Campus Safety, with oversight over the UCLA police department and Office of Emergency Management, and hiring an associate vice chancellor to lead it. UCLA hired Rick Braziel, a former Sacramento police chief and expert in law enforcement response reviews, for that role earlier this year on a temporary contract; he has begun to overhaul safety and security operations.

In the long term, the review said, UCLA should convene a campuswide conversation to reach agreement on the proper role of police. Some faculty and students, for instance, want to eliminate police from campus entirely and use trained civilian mediators instead to address problems — using outside law enforcement to handle serious crimes.

“This central tension — whether and how police provide public safety, and for whom — is part of a national conversation about the role of police and the meaning of public safety,” the review said. “UCLA has thus far responded to this tension ineffectively, by functionally excluding police from planning and engagement but then asking law enforcement to engage once tensions have escalated to violence.”

UCLA shortcomings revealed

The review provided a detailed look at UCLA’s failures and recommended how to fix future responses to campus unrest or emergencies.

Two groups of UCLA campus leaders mobilized to meet about the encampment and protests but were ineffective. One group of senior administrators excluded UCLA police and sowed frustration by the ”free-flowing debate, internecine conflict, and a notable lack of decision-making.”
Going forward, UCLA should appoint an “incident commander” with overall management responsibility and follow a well-known national model for emergency response.
Administrators and campus police should coordinate response plans and engage in joint training exercises. The UC systemwide community safety plan calls for “tiered responses” to protests, with law enforcement brought in as a last resort, but police were “almost entirely uninvolved” in decision-making.
Campus police, for instance, were not consulted when UCLA approved a permit for a pro-Israel rally to be set up next to the encampment two days before the melee. Police might have been able to warn about the potential danger of dueling protest groups next to each other; physical skirmishes did break out between them.
UCLA should update its agreements for mutual aid with other law enforcement agencies and specifically develop one with the LAPD to clarify what assistance can be provided.
UCLA should improve communications to both the campus and the public, which were “disjointed” during the spring protests.
The campus should hire a cadre of full-time, unarmed public safety officers empowered to intervene when people are flouting campus rules. That would fill the gap between part-time civilian staff, who mainly observe and report suspicious activity to police, and law enforcement, the review said.

‘Deeply troubling’ reports of antisemitism

The independent review came out after the UC Board of Regents met in San Francisco to discuss UCLA’s “campus climate” and three task force reports released this year that criticized the university response to allegations of antisemitism and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism.

In a 93-page report released last month, a UCLA task force on antisemitism described “broad-based perceptions of antisemitic and anti-Israeli bias on campus” among students, lecturers, faculty, staff and administrators.

The report, which surveyed hundreds of individuals contacted through Jewish organizations, found that 84% believed that antisemitism had “worsened or significantly worsened” since Oct. 7, 2023, and that roughly 70% said the spring encampment was “a source of antisemitism.” Another 40% said they experienced antisemitic discrimination in their time at UCLA.

Two reports from the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, released in April and June, also decried campus being “less safe than ever” for those groups and said there was “increased harassment, violence, and targeting” of them but did not provide survey data.

Regents spent about 40 minutes discussing the reports, with all but a few minutes focused on antisemitism.

“I am just shocked that in 2024 we have a report which alleges extensive antisemitism affecting Jewish students, faculty and staff at really one of the most prestigious universities in the world,” said Regent Rich Leib.

“We have lost our way,” he later added. “This is not a simple problem of enforcing our rules. We need to take stock and do everything in our power to restore our campuses to safe and sane places.”

Leib also criticized faculty leaders in the Academic Senate.

“This report clearly delineates numerous and frequent instances of faculty who violated the rules and joined the encampments or made comments in their classrooms that were not consistent with rules ... yet the report indicates that not one faculty member was disciplined by the Academic Senate. That seems intolerable to me and has to change,” he said.

In response, Academic Senate Chair Steven W. Cheung told regents that faculty disciplinary processes were meant to “protect our due diligence rights, our rights to a hearing, and to make sure we are deliberative in our decision-making.” He said the Senate was not interested in “fossilized” processes and would welcome reviewing them with the regents.

Regent Jay Sures grilled UCLA Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt on the campus administration’s progress in investigating allegations of antisemitic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim incidents since Oct. 7, 2023, which Hunt said were in the “hundreds” on “both sides.”

Hunt said the investigations were ongoing and that “some of these cases can take up to a year to resolve.”

Drake called the antisemitism report “deeply troubling” and touted the university’s new systemwide office of civil rights that is dealing with discrimination across campuses.

“We can and we must do better,” Drake said.