The morning after New York City police flooded Columbia University and arrested at least 100 students and faculty for trespassing on their own campus, Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard — who rode into the scene last night on top of an armored military vehicle — got on a morning talk show to claim that protestors brought a heavy duty chain to barricade doors.
“This is not what students bring to school,” Sheppard said, holding the chain to the camera. “These are heavy industrial chains that were locked with bike locks, and this is what we encountered on every door inside of Hamilton Hall.”
Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard shows the chains used to secure Hamilton Hall at Columbia University.
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) May 1, 2024
"This is not what students bring to school. This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities." pic.twitter.com/fwFUPZlIj7
But this is exactly what students bring to school, and it’s a bike lock chain that’s recommended to them through the Columbia University website. As journalist Aric Toler and several others have pointed out on social media, this exact Kryptonite brand lock was recently on sale through Columbia's Public Safety department, as part of its "Crime Prevention Discount Bike, Locker and Laptop Lock Program.”
The City journalist Katie Honan showed the flyer to Sheppard at a press conference Wednesday morning, and he repeated the claim that students would not bring this chain to school. But this lock is not only recommended by Columbia’s own security department; it’s one of only a handful that actually carries a guarantee in Manhattan.
While Kryptonite offers anti-theft protection guarantees in most states, bike theft is so common in New York City that the company only offers that protection guarantee on a handful of its most heavy-duty locks, including the “New York Fahgettaboudit Chain” Sheppard is waving in front of virtually every news camera he’s encountered this morning. If you’re a student at Columbia and locking up your bike on campus, your choices for guaranteed locks are narrowed to ones like the chain Sheppard and his officers are so befuddled by. These types of chain locks are extremely common in New York specifically because they’re long enough that they can be looped through a bike’s wheel and its frame, because bike thieves in New York often steal wheels off of bikes whose frames are locked up, but whose wheels are not.
The implication, of course, is that Gaza solidarity protestors — who have been occupying their own campus peacefully for two weeks — are not innocent students exercising a First Amendment right to protest, but are somehow professional, tactical, “industrial” agitators who deserve military-grade police intervention. Showing off a common bike lock as some kind of impressive barricading tactic is an attempt to manufacture consent for the brutality the NYPD brought to campus overnight.
