The University of California Police Department (UCPD) is using what the Los Angeles Times describes as “Jan. 6 tactics” to identify vigilantes who attacked the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) “encampment” April 30.
As Breitbart News reported, 100 or so vigilantes attacked the encampment on the night of April 30 to May 1, and were attacked in return. Police took hours to respond to the mélee. For nearly a week beforehand, the encampment had been bullying Jewish students on campus, physically barring them — and anyone else — from entering the main quad on campus. The activists used antisemitic rhetoric and physically assaulted journalists (including this reporter).
UCLA did not intervene, and UCPD was said to have been told by the university not to disturb the encampment. A security contractor who spoke to Breitbart News said that the encampment had been placed in charge of contractors.
It was only after the overnight battle that police intervened and that state and local officials finally responded to the problems posed by the encampment, which was cleared the next night.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block promised to prosecute and punish the vigilantes — after making no such promises about the encampment for nearly a week in which Jewish students, and Jewish communities living nearby, were forced to live in fear.
President Joe Biden himself said Tuesday — without specifically referring to UCLA — that actions taken by the activists were antisemitic:
And as Jews around the world still cope with the atrocities and trauma of that day [October 7th] and its aftermath, we’ve seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world: vicious propaganda on social media, Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts.
On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class.
Antisemitism — antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State.
Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews.
It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop.
However, the university did not act until provoked to do so by the vigilantes.
Now, the Times reports, the UCPD is undertaking what may be the biggest investigation in its history, using tactics that federal law enforcement used, such as facial recognition tools, in the investigation of the January 6 Capitol riot:
It is shaping up to be perhaps the biggest case in the history of the UCLA Police Department: how to identify dozens of people who attacked a pro-Palestinian camp at the center of campus last week.
…
UCLA detectives are now scanning hundreds of images in an attempt to identify the attackers. They intend to use technology that captures facial images and compares them to other photos on the internet and social media to put names to faces, according to law enforcement sources.
The same technology has allowed police to identify suspects in smash-and-grab retail burglaries. It also was the heart of the Jan. 6 investigation, in which videos of those storming the U.S. Capitol helped the FBI identify many of the assailants and led federal prosecutors to charge more than 1,300 people. In those cases, investigators often were able to find social media images of the assailant wearing the same clothing as during the attack.
Pro-Palestinian activists at the encampment believe police sided with the vigilantes because they took so long to react. However, police and security tolerated the encampment for days after allegedly being told by UCLA not to intervene.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
