More than a quarter of protesters arrested Tuesday at Columbia University and 60 percent of those arrested at the City College of New York had no connections to the institutions, according to data from the New York Police Department, as reported by the Washington Post. On the two New York campuses, police arrested 282 protesters on Tuesday; 144 did not have school connections, according to NYPD. Police broke it down further: of the 112 arrested at Columbia, 32 were not affiliated with the school; at CCNY, 102 of the 170 arrested there were not affiliated with that school, police said.
As protests have ramped up, some police and college administrators have claimed that “outside agitators” were driving the protests; those claims have been disputed by some faculty members and student protestors, who called it a “myth.” More than 2,000 people have been arrested since last month, when the arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia set off a wave of activism at college campuses across the country. New York Mayor Eric Adams and law enforcement officials have said that “outside agitators” were co-opting protests in the city, which escalated this week when people barricaded themselves in Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, an academic building on the university’s Morningside Heights campus.