Many Democratic lawmakers want little to do with the debate over how police are handling the campus protests over Gaza, quick to say they either don’t know the details or don’t think there’s any space for them to meaningfully weigh in.
At Columbia University, police officers with the New York Police Department reportedly threw a protester down the stairs in front of a building, slammed protesters with metal barricades and pushed some of them to the ground. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a professor said she was injured by police. At the University of California-Los Angeles, where counterprotesters reportedly attacked protesting students, police officers didn’t show up for hours.
Hardly any Democratic lawmakers have put out statements or spoken out about how police have handled the protests. And when NOTUS asked more than a dozen Democrats about the reports of violence, most either said they knew too little to comment or tepidly defended the response.