An NYPD officer accidentally discharged his gun inside a Columbia University administration building while clearing out protesters camped inside, the department disclosed late Thursday.
No one was injured by the officer’s mistake Tuesday night inside Hamilton Hall on the Columbia campus, the NYPD said Thursday. He was trying to use the flashlight attached to his gun at the time and instead fired a single round that struck a frame on the wall.
There were other officers but no students in the immediate vicinity, officials said. Body camera footage shows when the officer’s gun went off, but the district attorney’s office is conducting a review, a standard practice.
The officer’s gun went off at 9:38 p.m., the NYPD said, about 10 minutes after police started pouring into Hamilton Hall. The department did not name the officer, whose actions were first reported by news outlet The City on Thursday.
Further details were not immediately available. The NYPD said it plans on conducting a full briefing about the incident Friday morning.
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More than 100 people were taken into custody during the Columbia crackdown, and another 170 were arrested at City College — numbers representing just a fraction of the total arrests stemming from recent campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
Law enforcement sources told NBC New York more than 40% of those arrested at Columbia and City College had no affiliation with the schools — and several had known criminal records. At Columbia, 80 students were arrested, with another 32 nonstudents taken into custody as well. At City College, the ratio was fairly different, with 68 students arrested as well as 102 nonstudents, the NYPD said.
A source told News 4 that it took so long to get numbers regarding the arrests in part because participants did not want to say who they were.
One of the arrested protesters was 40-year-old James Carlson, of Brooklyn, who was sought by police in connection to a hate crime attack and has multiple arrests. Others had connections to other protests in the city, including during the 2023 Thanksgiving Day Parade. Another individual had previously been fired from her job at the New York Botanical Garden after stating in a video that she felt “proud” following the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel, according to a senior law enforcement official.
On April 18, the NYPD cleared Columbia’s initial encampment and arrested roughly 100 protesters. The demonstrators set up new tents and defied threats of suspension, and escalated their actions early Tuesday by occupying Hamilton Hall, an administration building that was similarly seized in 1968 by students protesting racism and the Vietnam War.
Roughly 20 hours later, officers stormed the hall. Video showed police with zip ties and riot shields streaming through a second-floor window. Police had said protesters inside presented no substantial resistance.
On Wednesday, officers also arrested more than a dozen people at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus after an encampment set up in the lobby. In New Jersey, pro-Palestinian protesters started taking down their tents Thursday afternoon after Rutgers imposed a deadline due to the protest interrupting final exams earlier in the day. The university confirmed the protest area will be cleared for the rest of the semester.
