SFPD Deployed to 8 Campus Protests, Including 2 Major Incidents Outside the Bay Area

San Francisco Police Department officers were deployed to eight pro-Palestinian campus protests across Northern California during the spring and summer, according to a presentation that SFPD officials will give to the city’s Police Commission on Wednesday evening.

The requests for mutual aid were made through the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to support campus police and other law enforcement agencies responding to the encampments and other demonstrations that rocked college campuses this year in protest of university investments in companies with ties to Israel or weapons manufacturing during the war in Gaza.

San Francisco officers made no arrests, recorded no use of force, and none were injured, according to the report.

SFPD officers traveled as far as UC Santa Cruz, where a student allegedly spat on one of them, and Cal Poly Humboldt, where 32 people were arrested and a local reporter was detained and zip-tied amid protesters’ occupation of an administration building.

Within the city, officers responded to San Francisco State, UC San Francisco, a University of California regents meeting at the system’s Mission Bay campus, and the private University of San Francisco, where personnel did not want a uniformed SFPD presence on campus, the report said. The response at USF included only monitoring by on-duty officers.

At UC Berkeley, one sergeant and 17 officers were deployed to a May 31 protest where students and demonstrators occupied a building, the report said, and university police did not have enough officers to safely address the issue.

Police Commissioner Kevin Benedicto requested the report in late spring when protests were ramping up across the country. He said that the lack of reported use of force is positive but that the high number of officers on the UC Berkeley campus raises some questions.

“Seventeen officers and a sergeant is a huge deployment,” Benedicto told KQED. “I just do want to make sure that we’re asking the right questions and that we’re really keeping up strong efforts to ensure really smart resource allocation of our very scarce police resources.”

In Humboldt, SFPD responded to a request from university police for 250 external law enforcement officers on April 27, according to an email obtained by The Appeal. Cal Poly Humboldt police policy permits officers to seek assistance from outside law enforcement if necessary.

Emails show law enforcement officers developed an action plan to combat what they described as the “threat of domestic violent extremism and criminal behavior” supposedly presented by protesters, and they shared these plans and materials with incoming officers from around the state.

One SFPD sergeant and 10 officers were deployed to the Redwood campus at 11 p.m. on April 29, SFPD said. SFPD provided “a uniformed presence,” “traffic control,” and “assisted in a skirmish line one block away” from where local police and Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies were making arrests, according to the report. Officers also received overtime for the deployments.

“Support only for local police as needed/necessary due to possible violent participants,” SFPD said in the report.

Jose Quezada, a photographer for the Eureka Times-Standard who was escorted off the campus on April 30, said there were officers “from all over.”

The officers were “fully armed with everything that I can imagine law enforcement or a militarized person could have,” Rouhollah Aghasaleh, an assistant professor at Cal Poly Humboldt’s School of Education, told The Appeal.

Griffin Mancuso, the editor in chief of the Cal Poly Humboldt student-run paper, the Lumberjack, said students heard rumors leading up to the April 29 raid that officers from out of town were coming to campus. The evening that hundreds of riot police arrived to arrest protesters and take down barricades, Mancuso said he saw police cars from other counties parked around the campus.

“We knew that that was a possibility going in, that there would be a fairly wide variety of officers,” Mancuso said. “I think [local police] were kind of preparing for the worst. I personally expected it to escalate way more than it actually did. And thankfully it didn’t. But I can only assume that’s why they pulled in officers from around California. We don’t really have a super extensive police force here, and we certainly don’t have the kind of gear that other forces do from bigger cities.”

Benedicto said deployment decisions are made by the San Francisco police chief and command staff, not the Police Commission, which is tasked with setting policy and has some oversight authority.

“We’re not going to micromanage the department in terms of its individual deployment decisions. That’s not something the commission wants to be in the position of doing or does,” Benedicto said. “I think the outcome, hopefully, is to ensure that the public are aware that this is how their resources are being used.”

KQED’s Sara Hossaini contributed to this report.