Yesterday at the Sabbath table, a young man who had been on the ground at UCLA told me of watching a Jewish student being attacked while the UC campus police did nothing.

The campus police said that they would have to call the actual police, but no police came. The campus cops then admitted that they didn’t actually call 911. When one of the people on the scene called 911, the LAPD stated that they had been told not to respond to calls from UCLA.

The student then had to go down to a police station to file a report which all but ensured that nothing would happen.

Today’s assaults by pro-Hamas occupiers make it clear that’s still the policy. UC’s Mary Osako stated that UCLA will not be “preemptively” requesting a police presence.

By the time the LAPD finally arrived, there had been assaults and the situation was out of control.

The pattern seems to be that the LAPD won’t respond to anything short of an imminent riot or displays of weapons. Unless there’s actual violence in progress or credibly imminent, the occupation area is effectively a no-go zone.

But in other parts of the country, it’s even worse.

Like Washington D.C.

Police in Washington, D.C., rejected requests from campus officials at George Washington University to clear anti-Israel protesters from their campus encampment this week, fearing that doing so could be bad publicity.

Although police were poised to disband the encampment at around 3 a.m. on Friday morning, city officials in the police chief’s and mayor’s office told police to stand down and said that it would look bad publicly for police to disrupt a “small number of peaceful protesters,” the Washington Post reported on Friday

So this is on Mayor Bowser.

While Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD have been (comparatively) responsive to larger-scale violence at Columbia U, the calculus again there appears to be no police response unless there’s significant violence.

What that means is that student or individual calls for help, especially after an assault, are going unanswered, and that means that the policy of tolerating not only no-go zones, but the violence associated with them, has emboldened Hamas supporters to assault Jewish students and faculty.

That’s why there is a very clear difference between police responses in liberal and conservative areas.

It’s not that the police can’t end the hate camps in NYC or LA, it’s that they’ve been told not to.

Image - Reuters