NYC Mayor Beckons City DA to Aggressively Prosecute Columbia Protesters
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is pressuring District Attorney Alvin Bragg to move forward with prosecuting the protesters at Columbia University who invaded and disrupted a library in early May. This library invasion led to the injuries of two security guards.
“I think the DA going forward with these charges is very important to discourage people from carrying out these actions, when you break into a dorm building, when you destroy property, when you harass students and menace them, we need to move forward in a very aggressive fashion to send a strong, loud message that this is not going to be tolerable,” Adams told the Washington Free Beacon.
The mayor is not satisfied with Bragg’s record in handling protesters who violate the law: “I think that with some of the protests here in this city and with some of the repeat offenders, the penalty is not matching,” he said.
Toward the end of the 2024 protest encampments at Columbia, the DA announced that most of the protesters who stormed the university’s Hamilton Hall were getting their cases dismissed after being charged with trespassing.
In 2022, Bragg issued a memo directing his staff to reduce incarcerations, a policy that may have been responsible for the trespassing charge dismissals. One of the provisions in this memo is to deprioritize the prosecution of young men due to an alleged lack of maturity prior to the age of 25. The DA believes this can decrease criminal recidivism.
According to Adams, the New York Police Department is cooperating fully with the DOJ to combat Anti-Semitism. The mayor is also a proponent of using the federal government to address these protest-related offenses:
“One of the things that’s very important is utilizing the power of the federal government and [DOJ Civil rights official Terrell’s] office to go after those who are committing these levels of anti-Semitism,” Adams said. “To look at what cases the federal government can pick up to deal with civil rights violations, and see how do we increase the penalty of such.”
