On April 30th, as dozens of Yale University students started the second day of their encampment to demand that the university divest from weapons manufacturing, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s New Haven office, Jennifer Wagner, sent an email to Yale Police Department (YPD) Chief Anthony Campbell. “The FBI has been monitoring the widespread protests related to the Israel/Hamas conflict at several colleges and universities,” she wrote, adding “if needed, FBI New Haven stands ready to provide support to you and your educational institutions” and “feel free to contact me either by cell or email should you need anything from the FBI.” Just two days later, the YPD—the university’s 93-officer-strong private security force that possesses law enforcement powers—appeared to have taken Wagner up on her offer, enlisting the help of the FBI to investigate a pro-Palestine student who was accused of poking a counter-protesting Zionist student in the eye with a flag. As one YPD detective wrote to a sergeant, describing the results of the collaboration, the “FBI [was] in possession” of the accused student’s cell phone after he had been “located by video” and “tracked to his apartment,” which was then searched under a warrant.

Emails with the FBI were just some of the 1,936 files Yale handed over in a settlement agreement to close out a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit I filed in late May 2024, which together document the university’s repressive strategy in dealing with pro-Palestine students. The documents reveal that the YPD installed cameras on campus, tracked students’ social media accounts, and monitored students using aerial drones. Additionally, the YPD also collaborated with the New Haven Police Department, other university police, pro-Israel organizations, and even a federal counterterrorism intelligence-sharing center in its effort to crack down on protest. Along the way, YPD officers repeatedly denigrated students they ostensibly work to protect: In one May 4th email, YPD Assistant Chief of Police Von Narcisse called the protesters “pathetic and sad,” with Campbell replying: “I agree 100 percent. There [sic] actions are like a small group of vandals and criminals rather than protesters.” (The YPD and Yale leadership did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

For decades, university police forces have been expanding: As of 2015, 75% of campuses were using armed officers. These police departments have also rapidly militarized, with over a hundred participating in the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which facilitates the transfer of military surplus equipment to police forces. Amid the nationwide outcry over police brutality in 2020, several universities, including Yale, pledged to rein in their police departments’ more aggressive practices. But with the clampdown on pro-Palestine protests, such attempts at restraint appear to have been short lived. “The [FOIA] documents really opened all of our eyes to the incredibly intense militarization of campus police forces,” said Naima Blanco-Norberg, one of the leaders of Yalies4Palestine—Yale’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine—after reviewing the documents. Sabiya Ahmed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, added that the “intense surveillance of students in the movement for Palestine” documented in the files is an attempt to “make students feel like they are doing something wrong, even criminal, by speaking up against genocide and for Palestinian rights”—all of which “can have a chilling effect” on future protest.

The powers of many campus police departments, including the YPD, are significant. The department is empowered to file charges against and arrest Yale students as well as New Haven residents; indeed, in 2008 the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission decided that these abilities are expansive enough to make Yale a public agency subject to the disclosure of documents in the public interest under the state’s FOIA. Yet, as the hundreds of emails disclosed to me under this provision show, YPD leadership was keen to use their department’s public powers to advance Yale’s private aims, basing enforcement decisions on administrators’ instructions, and at times, direct pressure from Zionist activists. For instance, after receiving nine emails in half an hour from pro-Israel individuals complaining about a mural of Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqa, who died in Israeli captivity this year, the YPD immediately began trying to identify the mural’s location. In an email to a colleague sent on April 17th, the night the first Columbia University encampment was cleared, Narcisse touted this hands-on approach to campus policing, writing, “The difference between Columbia and us is that we have a legit police force, ready to go, 24-7. We don’t need to, and won’t, wait for law enforcement capabilities to mobilize; we can and will do it ourselves, swiftly. Jail awaits criminal violations such as what we see in Columbia. Zero tolerance and rapid consequences for lawlessness.”

To achieve these aims, the YPD invested heavily in monitoring student organizations’ activities throughout the spring. Soon after the first pro-Palestine encampment was established on April 19th, the YPD discussed adding and repositioning on-campus cameras to provide a better vantage point to observe the students’ setup. Additionally, numerous aerial photos as well as emails about drone training and use reveal that Yale also utilized an advanced drone surveillance program to watch protesters. Specifically, drone flight logs show that Yale is in possession of an arsenal of at least three drones, one of which is a military-grade weapon manufactured by Skydio—a company that sold at least 100 drones to the Israeli army in the weeks following October 7th, 2023. YPD officers also discussed reviewing footage of protesters from New Haven Police Department drones. The goal of this monitoring appears to have been twofold: first, to assess the body count of each instance of protest to be able to deploy the right number of officers to handle it, and secondly, to assemble dossiers on suspected students with which to later punish them. The YPD also used information like suspected students’ swipe history—which recorded the buildings and times at which IDs were scanned—to this end. In an April 29th email, YPD officer Christopher Confrancesco wrote to Campbell, “Attached is one of the individuals, which we identified, you had an interaction with on 04-28-2024 on Cross Campus. ID swipes were pulled for Berkeley College south after the individual was seen on video swiping in.” Yale appears to have used a combination of such tactics to identify the student against whom it chose to pursue charges for letting down an American flag from its central flagpole during a protest: The school’s dossier on the individual included surveillance photos from inside campus buildings and swipe records.