Research focus

As the genocide in Palestine rages on, people throughout the world have been mobilizing actions in support of Palestinians. For my final project, I want to focus on visualizing pro-Palestine protests in the United States from October 7, 2023 to November 17th, 2024. How many actions are taking place each week? How many pro-Palestine protests have taken place in different states across the country, and at how many of these protests have there been arrests?

Are there certain cities that experience more militarized police repression through arrests? What is the overall number of arrests that have taken place at pro-Palestine protests across the United States? What is the breakdown of police brutality at protests where arrests have taken place in New York, in comparison to the average overall across the states? As someone who has been arrested 4 times just this year in New York, I suspect that New York emerges as a policing leader.

How have arrests been used against pro-Palestine protestors in the community, versus at schools? How do the police respond differently to pro-Palestine protestors at schools, versus in the community? What types of, and how many, pro-Palestine actions have different schools in NY taken?

The audience of my blog post is people involved in the Palestinian liberation movement in the United States, with a focus on student actions. The research conducted may be of particular interest to folks who generally study social movements, as well as those researching protest-related police brutality and repression.

Dataset and variables

I will be using a filtered dataset from the Crowd Counting Consortium, which is updated and maintained by the Nonviolent Action Lab, a research program within the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Since the CCC collects data for all kinds of political action in the US, I will be using data specifically compiled from the CCC for their pro-Palestine dashboard, which I was able to access through their R script uploaded to GitHub. The final version of the dataset I am using can be found here.

Each row in my dataset will represent a separate pro-Palestine protest, with the following relevant variables: date, state, location detail, type, arrests, and police measures. Unfortunately, the dataset was rather difficult to work with, since a variety of different protest types and police measures have been employed and categorized in sometimes almost identical, yet different ways. I created the following calculated fields and groups to further my analysis:

field	description
any arrests?	a string identifying whether there were “arrests” or “no arrests” at the protest
police force/punch/push?	a string identifying whether the police measures for a specific protest mentioned the use of “force”, “punch” or “push” against protestors
police helicopters/drones?	a string identifying whether the police measures for a specific protest mentioned the use of “helicopters” or “drones” to surveil protestors
police riot gear?	a string identifying whether the police measures for a specific protest mentioned the use of “riot gear”
school or community?	a string identifying whether a protest was organized by people at a “school” or in the “community”
type (group)	a grouping of protest types, organized to combine types that were identical to one another, yet written differently (for example: “vigil; demonstration” was grouped with “demonstration; vigil”)

Visualizations

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Over the time period covered by this research, the time series graph above shows that the number of pro-Palestine protests has been relatively in the community, with a noticeable peak in schools around the time of student encampments.

here

California leads in the number of pro-Palestine protests since October 7, 2023, with upwards of 3,400 protests! As someone who has seen how active New York has been in resisting the genocide from the very beginning, I was surprised that New York had less protests than California. However, this makes sense given the difference in population; California has population of ~38 million, whereas New York has a population of ~19 million. Interestingly though, New York has more protests where people have been arrested in comparison to California… New York has had 159 protests where arrests have taken place, which is more than double California’s 65 protests with arrests!

here

New York has arrested more than double the amount of pro-Palestine protestors than California. Over 3,500 people have been arrested at pro-Palestine protests just in New York alone since the beginning of the genocide. Although a majority of arrests have taken place against the community, a sizable potion of these arrests were at schools. Interestingly, the majority of all arrests that have occurred in Massachusetts took place at schools. Over 130 of these arrests were of students at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Over time, there has been many different peaks observed in arrests taking place at pro-Palestine protests. The visualization above reflects the number of arrests in California, DC, and New York. I have added an annotation for one peak per state that reflects different historical context for the increased mass arrests. As I had expected, there have been multiple substantial peaks in mass arrests that have taken place in New York.

here

The line graphs in the dashboard above depict the use of different police response measures at pro-Palestine protests over time, particularly riot gear, helicopter/drones, and police brutality. The red line represents school protests, while the green line represents community protests. A spike of these three police measures at pro-Palestine protests in schools is observed around the time of student encampments.

here

The dashboard above features 4 pie charts depicting the presence of police brutality at pro-Palestine protests with arrests. Occurrences of police brutality are determined by police measures containing the words “force”, “punch” or “push”. Overall, across the United States, ~27% of protests where arrests took place showed instances of police brutality. As I had suspected due to my own interactions with police at protests locally, New York had a higher rate of police brutality at protests with arrests, with ~34%.

here

In the word clouds above, different types of pro-Palestine actions in NY are shown. The visualization features a filter, so that a choice of state can be made for people to see what the word cloud would look like for another state. There are two separate word clouds, one for protests in the community, and another for protests taking place at schools. The size of the type reflects the number of protests.

here

The bar chart above shows the number of pro-Palestine actions by type, for schools in the state of New York. Columbia University has the greatest number of actions, having hosted 10 protests, 31 demonstrations, 33 vigils, and 11 rallies. The bar chart only includes schools that have organized at least 3 actions. The visualization includes a dropdown to choose the school for which the bar chart will be updated to reflect, and can be animated to go through the available selection of schools.

Reflections

In my work on this project, I had lots of concerns about what I was visualizing. Although I was happy to find this dataset, I know that I was approaching this data from the perspective of not just a student and researcher, but as someone who has been engaged in labor organizing for Palestinian liberation since the beginning of the genocide. I wonder how others might engage with this dataset in a way that aims to surveil and target different schools and community organizations that have been resisting for Palestinian liberation.

As a digital humanist whose research focuses on creating digital memory archives as sites of tech labor resistance, I found that despite the extensive nature of this dataset, I wished there was a more central focus on experiences of police brutality at these protests through community-collected interviews with protestors themselves. I didn’t feel satisfied at tracking police brutality through the use of “force” “punch” or “push” present in the police measures field. I suspect that many instances of police brutality may be missing, or underrepresented. Furthermore, I feel conflicted about how the data visualizations represent such a flattening, detached depiction of the trauma resulting from police brutality. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I had been arrested 4 times this past year. Of those arrests, 2 were particularly violent. Each of those arrests that were violent have severely clarified my perception of the purpose of the police as a force to be leveraged against the will of the people. I can’t help but think about the connections between policing in the US, and the violence enacted against Palestinians abroad as they are subjected to the genocidal campaign of the Israeli military… after all, the NYPD trains with the Israeli Occupation Forces – meaning that the tactics we see in Palestine are exported to the rest of the world. This effect is known as the imperial boomerang, “a term for the way in which empires use their colonies as laboratories for methods of counter-insurgency, social control and repression, methods which can then be brought back to the imperial metropolis and deployed against the marginalised, subjugated and subaltern within.”

I end this piece by adding some pictures, videos, legal documents, journal entries, and collages surrounding a particularly violent arrest of mine that took place during the Met Gala protest earlier this year, on May 6th, 2024. I hope that in sharing a more intimate perspective into my own experiences with police brutality, I can offer an invitation to reflect all that is lost in a data visualization that aggregates these violent encounters with the police.

Pictures and video

I was body slammed to the ground during the arrest, and suffered a number of injuries, including scrapes that I still have scars from as well as a mild concussion.

*A picture of Zelda being arrested by NYPD after being brutalized by the Strategic Response Group.*

*A picture of Zelda being arrested by NYPDs Strategic Response Group. Credit to @oshimages on Instagram.*

*A picture of Pig Peters yelling as Zelda is escorted by two NYPD SRG officers. Credit to @oshimages on Instagram.*

Legal documents

*Zelda was arrested violently during the Met Gala protest. Once taken to 1 Police Plaza for processing, Zelda was charged with “Penal Law 205.30: Resisting arrest… a class A misdemeanor.”*

*An image of Zelda’s “Prisoner Movement Slip” which includes the mugshot taken during processing at 1 Police Plaza, as well as the charges Zelda was facing.*

Collage art and journal entries

*Zelda suffered a mild concussion from their arrest by NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, and created this collage while they were resting and recovering.*

*A brief journal entry by Zelda on the injuries they sustained at the hands of the New York Police Department.*

Journal Entry from May 9th, 2024

Journal Entry from May 12th, 2024

Journal Entry from May 13th, 2024

*A collage piece by Zelda as they think about community forged in the midst of heartbreak.*

“Artistic Noise” – Postcard collages

As part of a new program known as the Rapid Reset at Midtown Community Court (also known as Midtown Justice Center), Zelda participated in a 90 minute class called “Artistic Noise” where they created 3 postcard collages in order to have the 2 misdemeanors they were facing dropped by the District Attorney’s office.