VISUAL FORENSICS
Despite warnings of violence at UCLA, police didn’t step in for over 3 hours

Faculty had raised alarms in the days before the attack on pro-Palestinian protesters. That night, one witness called emergency services 11 times before police intervened.

By Jon Swaine, Hannah Natanson, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Sarah Cahlan and Jonathan Baran
May 11, 2024 at 9:52 a.m. EDT

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Late on April 30, Sean Tabibian called 911 to say police were needed urgently at the University of California at Los Angeles. “All hell had broken loose,” Tabibian recalled in an interview. Masked agitators were attacking pro-Palestinian protesters on a campus quad, video footage shows, and a team of hired security guards had retreated.

The call at 11:09 p.m. was the first of 11 that Tabibian made to police that night as the violence escalated, according to his cellphone’s call log. Other witnesses called 911 as well, records show. ... “They said they were responding,” said Tabibian, a local business executive and UCLA alumnus who was near campus around the time commotion erupted at the encampment, and who said he was concerned that protesters had been discriminating against Jewish students. “They kept saying they’re responding, they’re responding.”

While a small UCLA patrol could be seen in footage briefly early on, law enforcement agencies did not move in to stop the violence until 3 hours and 34 minutes after Tabibian’s first 911 call, a Washington Post examination has found — a delay that prolonged one of the most violent altercations since pro-Palestinian protesters began setting up encampments on college campuses across the country this spring.

The examination — based on evidence including more than 200 videos, emergency radio transmissions, text messages and interviews with more than a dozen witnesses — illuminates the stakes for university and local officials as they decide if and when to call police to deal with pro-Palestinian encampments. Elsewhere police have been accused of using heavy-handed tactics, but at UCLA, where university policy discourages calling police preemptively, campus police as well as the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol are facing scrutiny for their hands-off approach that night.

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Samuel Oakford and Jarrett Ley in New York contributed to this report.

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