DENVER — Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas said at a citizens oversight board meeting on Friday that the police department has no plans to participate in another sweep of the pro-Palestinian encampment on the Auraria Campus.
"We absolutely aren't going to go in and sweep out this peaceful protest just because they're occupying a space on your campus that you'd like to use for something else right now and because of your fears that maybe this could grow to the point that it interferes with other campus activities," Thomas said on Friday that he told Auraria Campus leadership.
The demonstration started April 25 with about 100 protesters on the Tivoli Quad. The protesters are calling on the campus universities – Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and University of Colorado Denver – to divest out of interests in Israel.
Some of them put up tents, which the Auraria Higher Education Center said violates campus policy. Campus administrators spoke with the demonstrators multiple times before law enforcement stepped in, resulting in the arrests of about 40 people last Friday. Auraria Police conducted that operation with support from Denver Police and Denver Sheriff Department.
Since then, no arrests have been made in connection with the protests.
On Friday, during a meeting with the Denver Citizen Oversight Board, Thomas addressed the Auraria Campus encampment and his department's support of the sweep that happened last Friday.
"My thought was that it would result in a small number of arrests, if any," he said. "Ultimately that didn't turn out to be the case."
He said the objective of the sweep was to remove the tents but that Auraria Police left the tents behind.
"As you might imagine, they just came and re-erected the tents and we were back at square one," Thomas said. "At which point in time, they asked us to come back and engage in the operation again, and that's when I shut it down, said I'm not doing that again."
He said the crowd had grown significantly larger and he didn't think it was safe or appropriate to do another sweep. He said that the Auraria Campus Police Department isn't big enough to deal with the encampment by themselves, so they're at the "behest" of the Denver Police Department.
"At the end of the day, while the school would prefer the group leave the area, I just don't think there is any legal way to do that," Thomas said. "Well, I know there's no legal way to do that, unless they truly do something that creates an unlawful assembly. And there's no intelligence at this point to suggest that's imminent."
He said that during last Friday's operation, about 40 people were arrested for trespassing and five were arrested for other violations like interfering with arrests. A Denver Police spokesman later said six were arrested for additional violations.
Thomas said it's unclear how many of those who were arrested are Auraria Campus students.
Auraria Campus on Thursday said a group of donors would give $15,000 to the international committee of the Red Cross if an encampment of pro-Palestine protesters came down by 5 p.m. Thursday. The protesters refused the offer.
Thursday was the eighth day of protests at the campus. An Auraria Campus spokesperson said on Tuesday that campus leaders met with leaders of Students for a Democratic Society "to listen to the group’s perspectives and try to achieve an amicable path forward."
The leaders said in the letter Thursday that they have "agreed to continue to have set meetings with SDS leadership."
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