TThe University of California Los Angeles campus police and the Los Angeles Police Department spent more than $630,000 in overtime this spring to break up protests and a Palestine solidarity camp on campus, according to public records obtained by The Independent.

Between April 25 and May 25, campus police spent $389,389 on overtime, while the LAPD spent an estimated $243,444 on overtime between April 30 and May 7, the periods of peak protest activity.

During this time, over 200 protesting students and counter-protesters were arrested at UCLA.

The overtime comes on top of the massive $10 million UCLA estimates it spent on security and protection during the protests between March and June.

Students and teachers are now asking whether the millions spent on additional security have actually made them safer.

“I was there from the beginning,” said Michael Chwe, a professor of political science at UCLA. The Independent“I think a lot of people forget that it was very peaceful. It was not aggressive in any way.”

Dr. Nir Hoftman, a professor at the Geffen School of Medicine and a member of UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group, disagrees that everything was entirely peaceful. He said he noticed troubling signs about the police force’s attitude toward the protests from the beginning, even before the camp, and when he needed help from the police, they did not give it to him.

Starting April 25, student groups set up a protest camp of about 30 tents at the state university, demanding that UC officials divest from businesses with ties to the Israeli military. This is part of a wave of nationwide protests on campus since Oct. 7 over the war between Israel and Hamas and larger issues surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict.

During the night and morning of April 30, the camp was attacked, as pro-Israel counter-protesters beat the assembled students with blunt objects and fired fireworks into the camp. Fighting broke out and chemical tear gas was sprayed by both sides while a small contingent of campus police and security largely stood by and watched.

“This is one of the most anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish attacks on our students in a long time,” Chwe said. “A large portion of the students attacked were Jews. It was very, very brutal.”

It took more than three hours for campus police, LAPD and California Highway Patrol to regain control, by which time many of the attackers had disappeared. An estimated 150 students were sprayed with pepper spray and bear repellent. At least 25 protesters were taken to the hospital, and volunteer paramedics had to transport some of the injured because city ambulances were not near the protest site, Chwe said.

The Independent has reached out to UCLA and UCLA Police for comment on this story. The LAPD responded to questions by instructing The Independent to the UCLA campus police.

On May 2, after the camp was declared an unlawful assembly, police moved in and arrested more than 200 people from the protest camp, mostly pro-Palestinian student activists. During the eviction, police used riot weapons such as stun grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas, which civil rights activists say violates state laws on the use of force.

Tajvir Dhesi, a 21-year-old political scientist from Texas, attended some of the camp protests to speak out against what he sees as Israel’s “genocide” in the Gaza Strip and to show his support for divestment and a Palestinian state.

He said it was “dystopian” to watch the police show of force, with riot police arresting activists while helicopters hovered overhead, a day after law enforcement failed to stop potentially deadly violence against those same students.

“They failed to protect the protesters when there was clearly violence,” he said. “The police did nothing and the next day the same people who had been brutally attacked were subjected to a raid where the entire camp was destroyed and some of these protesters were injured by the police. That’s just a very odd prioritization.”

Professor Hoftman said that in the months following Oct. 7, he observed protesters disrupting events on campus, including erecting a statue of a pig holding a sack of money outside a university board of trustees meeting in March – a gesture many viewed as anti-Semitic – while there appeared to be little interference from police.

Campus security told him to report any complaints to campus police. When he went to campus police, Hoftman said an officer told him it was “bullshit,” but campus officers told them not to intervene.

When Hoftman personally inspected the camp, he said he was physically attacked by a group of men wearing keffiyeh scarves, a symbol of Palestinian resistance, while campus security stood by and watched.

“Why should these thugs be able to drive me off campus?” he said The Independent.

During a subsequent visit to the camp, Hoftman said he was mugged and had an earpiece stolen, again without police intervention or investigation. He also said he witnessed disturbing, violent clashes during a pro-Israel event on April 28, in which pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel supporters fought each other when a barrier separating the two groups was breached.

“I think, ‘this is going to end in absolute disaster,’ and the rest is history,” he added.

According to the university’s Daily Bruin newspaper, nearly 600 LAPD officers were on campus at the height of the encampment. That’s consistent with scenes at other elite college campuses like Columbia, where hundreds of NYPD officers cleared a campus encampment and occupied buildings.

It took nearly another month until 18-year-old Edan On was arrested on May 24 and the UCLA camp defendants were arrested. (In June, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to charge him, saying there was insufficient evidence.)

Protests continued throughout May. A group of 44 protesters were arrested in a parking garage where they had gathered ahead of a planned sit-in. Police said they had bolt cutters, superglue and padlocks. In late May, another group of about 70 protesters, who had been evicted by police from a subsequent encampment, occupied UCLA’s Dodd Hall and were quickly dispersed by riot patrols.

Chwe argues that pro-Palestinian campus activists were the main victims of violence last semester, from both counter-protesters and police.

“There are very few, if any, other people who have experienced violence who were not among the protesters demanding divestment,” he said. “It’s still hard to comprehend that something like this can happen in the United States and on a college campus, where we’re supposed to be talking about solving problems through dialogue. It’s really very disturbing.”

Dhesi graduated from UCLA this spring and said his experience on campus will stay with him as he begins law school after a year off. He is not opposed to spending money on police and has considered becoming a prosecutor, but said he believes the city and state’s resources could have been better spent.

“If you’re going to spend the money, you should have spent it the night of the attack on the camp,” he said. “That was truly the worst day I’ve ever spent at UCLA.”

Hoftman said that since May, campus police appear to be more proactive, shutting down unauthorized camps before they even form, but they still have no idea how to protect “minority communities” on campus.

“They just react,” he said. “They don’t intervene and try to prevent things.”