Northwestern University considered “additional law enforcement resources” from departments outside of Evanston to help its campus police with the pro-Palestinian encampment on Deering Meadow, according to records obtained by the RoundTable.
Emails released via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show NUPD leadership consulted with the Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System (ILEAS) throughout the five-day span that students staged a tent encampment on Deering Meadow, and at least intended to contact the Illinois State Police as well. These records also offer a view into how the university communicated and coordinated with the Evanston Police Department, which took a hands-off approach that Mayor Daniel Biss later said was “perfectly aligned” with the views of other city leaders.
Northwestern students launched the tent encampment on the morning of April 25 to demand the university divest from and end partnerships with Israel, the first such campus occupation in the Chicago area as similar protests proliferated on college campuses nationwide. Slightly more than 100 hours later, on April 29, the university announced a negotiated agreement with student organizers to functionally end the overnight occupation without direct police involvement.
That agreement left NUPD officers’ brief and unsuccessful attempt to clear the camp on the morning of April 25 as the only direct police action against the protest – but emails show that NUPD consulted with other police agencies up to and including the day the agreement was announced.
Town-gown coordination
Email records obtained through a FOIA request to the city show that town-gown leaders were in communication throughout Friday, April 26, including through several emails and a joint Zoom meeting.
The day opened with Evanston Police Chief Schenita Stewart sending a clear policy statement to city and university officials: given the lack of “an immediate specific threat to public safety,” Evanston police “[would] not assist in clearing the encampment” unless such a threat were to develop. She recognized it’d be “prudent to thoughtfully and carefully prepare for the possibility,” though, and proposed a town-gown meeting to “prepare both agencies” for the possibility of clearing the encampment and making arrests if necessary.
Northwestern Police Chief Bruce Lewis agreed a meeting would be helpful, and after some coordination, an invite to an hourlong Zoom meeting that afternoon was sent to everyone on the email chain – 15 different NU and city officials in total. The RoundTable does not have a recording or notes from the meeting itself, but two follow-up emails shed some light on what was discussed.
In the first, Stewart said EPD would “continue to evaluate our personnel needs” over the weekend, and she suggested holding another meeting soon to “find out what NU has learned from Student Affairs, the Illinois State Police and ILEAS.”
ILEAS is a statewide law enforcement “mutual aid” network, in which member agencies commit to sharing personnel and other resources with each other upon request for incidents that would overwhelm them individually. This includes sending regular officers and vehicles in situations like natural disasters, as well as maintaining specialized regional teams to respond to both tactical threats and civil disorder. More than 900 local police agencies, including both EPD and NUPD, are members.
In a phone call with the RoundTable, ILEAS Executive Director Larry Evans explained that his organization does not directly employ any of the officers provided in response to a mutual aid request but rather provides “the infrastructure that allows the communication and the response” between member agencies.
“We don’t have any officers or any people that are considered, let’s say ‘operational,’ on our staff,” Evans said. “Everything that we do is just more along the lines of making sure that you as an afflicted agency can get access to resources that either you don’t have, or you don’t have the time to amass on your own because you’re busy with the problem.”
The RoundTable found no further reference to the Illinois State Police in the course of reporting, and it’s unclear if NUPD directly communicated with or consulted the agency on the encampment. ISP officers helped local police responding to an encampment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on April 26, and the agency’s intelligence center distributed a bulletin to police in early May concerning the “increased urgency levels” posed by the encampments cropping up in Illinois.
Back in Evanston, NUPD Chief Lewis sent the second follow-up email meeting 30 minutes after Stewart’s, in which he thanked her for discussing the encampment “within the context of the mutual aid agreement” and said NUPD would “continue collaborating with EPD as we consider additional law enforcement resources.”
The “mutual aid agreement” Lewis refers to is the Agreement for Mutual Cooperation between the two departments, which was last revised in 2008. This document outlines how their powers and jurisdictions overlap and interact, including a policy on how NUPD can request EPD’s assistance for “demonstrations or mass disorders” on campus.
It appears there was not another all-call meeting before the end of the encampment; there are no further emails from that day, and the only other town-gown emails released by the city concern closures along Sheridan Road for the April 27 Lakeshore Shuffle 5K. But Biss separately told the RoundTable after his May 8 State of the City address that there was a “continuing conversation at all levels,” including calls among the two police chiefs, himself and Northwestern President Michael Schill.
Consulting with ILEAS
Northwestern was also in continuous contact with ILEAS about the encampment: Through a separate FOIA request to the mutual aid organization, the RoundTable obtained an email sent on Monday, April 29 by NUPD Deputy Chief Eric Chin to Peter Smith, an ILEAS regional planning coordinator, asking to “find time today to consult about our current on-campus protest.”
No further emails were included in response to the RoundTable’s FOIA request. Chin sent the email just after 8:30 a.m., only six hours before the university announced the agreement with student organizers to end the encampment.
Evans told the RoundTable that ILEAS coordinators each have a group of member agencies they work with in a given area, which typically means “making the rounds” on updating their available resources and the like, but can also include consulting with them when an incident does occur. He said Chin’s consultation with Smith was “really just a check-in” on the situation and that “no real advice was given” to NUPD on how to proceed with the encampment, as ILEAS doesn’t take a leadership role when a member requests assistance.
“We’re not in the advice business when it comes to whether or not somebody should be doing something,” Evans said. “We’re just in the support business for, once something is being done, how is it that we can help you?”
EPD Commander Ryan Glew wrote in an email to the RoundTable that if Northwestern had requested outside police help, EPD “would have had to evaluate the totality of the situation” before deciding to provide direct assistance as well.
“The mere cooperation of ILEAS or ISP would not have been a single decision-making point, but one of the many factors to be considered,” Glew wrote.
Ultimately though, Northwestern did not request personnel or other help from either agency; in fact, Evans said the ILEAS system was not activated to help in clearing any campus encampment across the state. Other Chicago-area encampments were cleared by officers from local police agencies, including Chicago police at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and university police at the University of Chicago.
Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates sent the RoundTable a written statement about the university’s decision-making process during the encampment, but did not directly answer a list of questions about the university’s coordination with EPD and outside organizations like ILEAS and ISP.
“We made decisions based on the real-time, ever-changing and rapidly escalating circumstances, weighing our options carefully,” Yates wrote. “Our top priority was always the safety and well-being of our entire community, including protecting and supporting our Jewish students who felt threatened by the encampment. The university was in frequent communication with the City of Evanston, including EPD, during this time period.”
Yates did not respond to a follow-up email with the RoundTable’s findings and asking the university for additional comment or context. During the encampment, the university denied the RoundTable’s request to access the campus for on-site reporting and threatened to arrest reporters for trespassing if they did not stay off-campus.
In his May 23 testimony to the U.S. House, Schill said the university negotiated with the encampment in part because the “limited law enforcement resources available” made a police clear-out “too high a risk to our students, staff and police officers.”
Unlike public universities, Northwestern is exempt from the Illinois FOIA statute as a private entity. This exemption extends to NUPD, despite its officers having the same powers as municipal police within its jurisdiction, which extends off campus and into north and central Evanston. A bill to remove this exemption for private campus police unanimously passed the Illinois House in 2015, but later died in committee in the Senate.
On Tuesday, university administrators announced a slate of measures intended to prevent disruption of Sunday’s commencement ceremony and other graduation celebrations this weekend, including designating a “free-speech area” outside each event for “anyone who wishes to engage in expressive activity.”
Emails: NU mulled outside police help for student encampment is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.