Police let violent mobs attack UCLA students. This is what lawlessness looks like | Judith Levine

UCLA watched the chaos unfold in the middle of the night and did nothing until it was far too late

Things had been tense at the University of California, Los Angeles, with some ugly jibes and the occasional shove exchanged between students who support Israel's war on Gaza and those who have set up encampments to call for a permanent ceasefire and the university's divestment from companies that arm and otherwise profit from Israel's occupation and military incursions in the Palestinian territories.

But what happened in the middle of the night last Tuesday was no scuffle. It was not even one more of the outsized, excessively brutal raids that college administrations have invited the police to inflict on their students.

Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept, and the author of five books