UMass Seeking Felony Riot Charges Against Palestinian Activists

by Dusty Christensen, Story Young, Dan McGlynn, and Shelby Lee

The following article, “UMass Seeking Felony Riot Charges Against Palestine Activists ” was originally published by The Shoestring on August 8, 2024. and is reposted here, with permission, via the Masswire News Service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.  Please contact The Shoestring directly for inquiries regarding further republication.

Read more: UMass Drops Request for Felony Charges Against Palestine Protestors by Dusty Christensen and Brian Zayatz (8/14/24).

Opinion: UMass Chancellor Reyes’ Police Action Was Unnecessary and Unprecedented. A Brief History of Dissent At UMass Amherst by Art Keene (5/17/24)

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Police at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are seeking felony charges of “inciting to riot” against two pro-Palestine activists over their roles in a May 7 protest encampment on the school’s campus.

The pending charges are the latest actions the university has taken against protesters who were involved in the encampment, which was the scene of a violent police crackdown resulting in the arrests of over 130 people. While the region’s district attorney has largely dismissed or reduced charges levied against the arrestees, the university has moved forward with academic sanctions and no-trespass orders. In interviews with The Shoestring, those arrested have questioned just how much the protest repression and its fallout cost taxpayers — a figure that records show soared to at least tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds.

Now, UMass police are seeking even more serious charges against the co-presidents of the campus chapter of the group Students for Justice in Palestine: Rüya Hazeyen and Maysoun Batley.

Records obtained by The Shoestring show that UMass police are attempting to bring charges of assault and battery on a police officer against Batley, alleging that she spit on a police officer. Police are also trying to bring charges of trespassing, failure to disperse, and “inciting to riot” against both Hazeyen and Batley, accusing them of encouraging people on the periphery of the protest to surround or “protect” the encampment. Inciting to riot is a felony charge that carries a possible maximum jail sentence of two and a half years, according to the state’s sentencing commission.

“This conduct added to an already unruly situation,” police alleged in court documents. Because people followed those alleged directions, police said it “caused dozens of more arrests to be needed to clear the area.” 

Because the two weren’t arrested, police had to file an application for criminal complaint against them. Those allegations will now come before the clerk-magistrate of Eastern Hampshire District Court, William Nagle, in what’s known as a “show cause hearing,” in which he will determine whether or not to allow those charges to move forward.

In a statement, Hazeyen and Batley’s lawyer, Jack Godleski, said that the two are looking forward to addressing the allegations in court. Godleski said that an equitable outcome of the show cause hearing would be for the clerk-magistrate to “screen out” their cases — essentially throwing them out.

“Both Ms. Batley and Ms. Hazeyen are dedicated activists and advocates for justice in Palestine at a time when their voice should be amplified by UMASS rather than blocked,” Godleski said in an email. “The university should have sought to encourage them instead of seeking a summons to court for a criminal application.”

UMass Amherst spokesperson Melinda Rose said in an email Wednesday that university Chancellor Javier Reyes was aware of the charges, but “out of respect for the independence of the judicial system” he would “not intervene in or comment on an active criminal proceeding.” Rose said that Reyes has asked that “the circumstances that led to the filing of these particular charges” be included in an independent review the university has commissioned into the events of May 7.  

It’s not the first time that UMass Amherst has pursued inciting to riot charges against students, though previously it was under very different circumstances. In 2014, the university brought those charges against some students who took part in the drunken, rowdy “Blarney Blowout” pre-St. Patrick’s Day celebration, according to the Associated Press. 

At the time, the AP reported police saying that the size and scope of those gatherings had led to “violence and fights, injuries, severe alcohol intoxication, sexual assaults, excessive noise, property damage and violence toward police and community members.” By contrast, organizers prohibited drugs and alcohol at the May 7 encampment, where Shoestring reporters on the scene all day witnessed peaceful demonstrations.

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In the wake of the mass arrests of May 7, university officials have pursued code-of-conduct sanctions against students, including removal of students from “good disciplinary standing” and assigning reflection papers. At least one graduate student’s degree is being withheld as court proceedings continue to play out.

The university police and Reyes also mailed no-trespass notices to 47 of the 134 arrestees, banning them from the UMass Amherst campus for two years. At least eight of them were erroneously sent to members of the UMass community and Five College students, according to Rose, and were rescinded upon appeal.

One of those who received a no-trespass order in the mail last week was Amherst resident Leyla Moushabeck, a Palestinian-American mother of two, co-owner of Interlink Publishing in Northampton, and co-founder of Valley Families for Palestine, a local organization dedicated to Palestinian solidarity with a focus on educating children.

“As a community member, it feels like a violation of the symbiotic relationship with the community,” Moushabeck said. “My taxes contribute and subsidize the land on which UMass stands.”

But now, she’s barred from stepping foot on campus — a decision she said has had a significant impact on her life. Moushabeck said Interlink Publishing regularly sponsors and hosts events at UMass Amherst, retains student interns, and publishes university professors’ work. 

“I live right next to UMass,” Moushabeck said. “I have relatives and friends that live on campus … I won’t be able to attend literary events the company hosts, pick up or drop off my kids … [Their] camps are at UMass. What message is this sending?” 

Also facing a no-trespass order is Jill Brevik, who together with Moushabeck co-founded Valley Families for Palestine. Also a mother of two, Brevik said that she and the group try to “bring our kids up in activism” by attending local protests and hosting kid-friendly events focused on Gaza.

A large Valley Families for Palestine banner was draped over a geodesic dome erected during UMass Students for Justice in Palestine’s first encampment in late April, which students dismantled after the university warned them that they could face arrest if they remained. Student activists played with children while parents handed out pizza and snacks at the organization’s table nearby. To Brevik, it was important that students felt heard and supported by the community.

However, she said the atmosphere of the May 7 encampment was different. Brevik arrived without her children at 6 p.m., about an hour and a half before arrests started. She said the scene was “tense,” with students preparing to face mass arrests instead of dismantling the encampment like they had the week before. 

As for the police, they looked like “they were ready to fight,” Brevik said. Moushabeck said she brought her family to the encampment, where they played with chalk together with students.

“There was no sign of anything that would suggest that it was an unsafe or riotous environment, until the police showed up,” Moushabeck said. “It felt like an incursion; there were masses of police in riot gear.”

Brevik, Moushabeck, and other Valley Families for Palestine members opted to put themselves in the “red zone,” an area close to the encampment that organizers warned would put protestors at a high risk of arrest. Brevik described a long night of arrests after police set up a perimeter around the encampment, characterizing their behavior as “vindictive.”

“We watched them take Palestinian flags and crumple them in our faces,” Brevik said.

As the night progressed, Brevik said she was arrested with the final wave of demonstrators after midnight. She was held in the Mullins Center, the UMass Amherst arena, before being processed at the university police station and released at around 7 a.m.

Now, three months later, after being held in the arena-turned-jailhouse, Brevik was informed she would no longer be allowed to take her children there to ice skate.

“We moved here for the campus community,” Brevik said, echoing Moushabeck’s concerns about the precedent that the no trespass orders are setting. She cited the property taxes she pays as an Amherst homeowner that subsidize the university she is now barred from stepping foot on. “It makes me feel like I don’t know why I live here.”

Brevik now has to face the possibility of arrest when visiting campus, whether she’s taking her children to the Fine Arts Center or to the ice skating rink in the Mullins Center. 

Moushabeck and the others who received no-trespass notices face the same possibility of arrest. In fact, every arrestee faces the risk of imprisonment without bail if they are arrested again before their cases resolve.

Having attended dozens of on-campus protests with her family, Moushabeck said the UMass Amherst administration’s “repressive” measures to quash dissenting voices denouncing genocide and calling on the university to divest from war profiteers represents a double standard she finds frightening. 

“It has only galvanized me more, because I don’t feel like I have a choice,” Moushabeck said. “I cannot raise my children in a place that says that money is more important than Palestinian lives.”  

In a statement, Rose, the university spokesperson, said that “no one was arrested or trespassed for protesting.” Rather, she said, no-trespass orders were “only sent to those who were arrested for refusing multiple lawful orders to disperse.” Further appeals “are under review from individuals who trespassed but have no affiliation with the university,” she said, adding that since 1980, university police have issued more than 3,000 trespass notices. 

Julian Drummond, a collaborative pianist employed by the UMass Amherst music department, was taking his sister to her first-year orientation when his parents alerted him to his no-trespass notice, which had been sent to their address in error.  After several days of repeated efforts and redirections, the university rescinded the notice, but not before it had disrupted his job and practice. 

“As someone who is Jewish and Asian, the only time I feared for my safety on campus is … when I was advocating for Palestine,” Drummond said.

Few who received the notice — which went out months after the protest and after the majority of disciplinary proceedings concluded — have been able to reach the department to appeal, despite several attempts at calls, voicemails, and emails, according to those who spoke to The Shoestring. 

Noting errors in the personal details on her notice, Emma Roth-Wells, freshly graduated from Mount Holyoke College, said she thought the notices were “ridiculous” and “extreme.”

“UMass is alienating their own — and surrounding — community by doing this,” she said. “It’s a public university where people all over the area partake in events.”

“The amount of time, money, and resources that is being wasted on policing the UMass students and surrounding community is just baffling to me,” she added. 

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It’s hard to pin down just how much the university’s protest crackdown and its fallout has cost taxpayers.

At least six police departments were deployed to the UMass Amherst campus on May 7, according to data obtained through public records requests. Officers were on site from Hadley, Amherst, and the Hampden County and Hampshire County sheriff’s departments. In total, 160 Massachusetts State Police officers, 35 university officers, and 14 local officers were on scene, Rose said. 

Of the Massachusetts State Police officers present that evening, many were part of the militarized Special Emergency Response Team, or SERT, a unit of the department that lists among its expertise “special event crowd management.” Student journalists with the Massachusetts Daily Collegian counted 109 state police vehicles parked outside of the Whitmore Administration Building on the evening of May 7.

The Shoestring requested data regarding pay for officers who were part of the encampment response from all six of these departments. 

According to documents obtained via these public records requests, UMass Amherst police alone spent over $42,000 on their response to the encampment, including overtime for their communications staff.

Hadley paid officers almost $1,000 in overtime during the encampment demonstration, though it’s unclear which officers were deployed to campus. One officer from the Hampshire County Sheriff’s Department was on the UMass grounds on May 7 and was paid over $900, records show.

In a statement, the Amherst Police Department said it paid officers for 21 overtime hours during the protest, but didn’t provide the dollar figures that corresponded with these hours. 

The Hampden County Sheriff’s Department did not provide pay data. The department’s general counsel, Theresa Finnegan, said in an email that “some transportation vans and officers did assist with transport of arrestees but were not involved in police activities.” 

The Massachusetts State Police did not respond to a public records request filed in May, despite several follow-up inquiries. The agency’s records portal, a service for tracking public records requests, has listed The Shoestring’s request as “in progress,” without any changes, for two months. 

Press freedom organizations like the New England First Amendment Coalition have consistently cited Massachusetts State Police as among the worst violators of Massachusetts public records law.

Though the cost of the state police’s presence is unknown, it’s likely far higher than the $42,000 spent by UMass Police, who had 46 officers deployed that evening compared with the 160 state police officers.

Police used a wide range of less-lethal weapons and surveillance technology during the protest.

UMass Amherst police used a long-range acoustic device to relay dispersal orders to demonstrators — essentially a large speaker designed to transmit messages or sounds at extremely high decibel levels. The technology has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union for its potential to cause hearing damage and its implementation as a less-lethal weapon by U.S. police forces. 

Police also used flash strobes throughout the arrests, disorienting students and obstructing recordings. Large floodlights were trucked in to illuminate demonstrators. Officers brandished mace and what appeared to be pepperball guns. Surveillance drones flew overhead and officers in casual attire filmed demonstrators with camcorders. Prosecutors have said that police watched hundreds of hours of footage from the protest to determine who to bring charges against. 

There are also other logistical costs the university incurred from calling in the police on demonstrators. That includes feeding officers on campus.

“Providing food and water to emergency response staff is standard procedure in incident response plans,” Rose said. 

Meanwhile, arrestees interviewed by The Shoestring said they were denied access to food, water, and bathrooms while detained.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the type of sanctions that arrestees have faced from the university. They are code-of-conduct violations.

Disclosure: One of the authors of this article, Story Young, was among those arrested at the May 7 protest. Another author, Dusty Christensen, is a faculty member at UMass Amherst. The Shoestring’s newsroom operates independently.

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