Yale Protester Arrested For Vandalism

A Yale PhD student will spend the night in New Haven police lockup Monday night, after Yale cops arrested them for allegedly tampering with an American flagpole in Beinecke Plaza during last week’s student-led, pro-Palestinian protest.

A university spokesperson told the Independent in an email statement that, on Monday afternoon, Yale police officers arrested ​“an individual suspected of vandalizing university property during last week’s protests on Beinecke Plaza.”

New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson confirmed that university police made that arrest off of a warrant charging the student with criminal mischief for allegedly tampering with the American flagpole in Beinecke Plaza during a pro-Palestinian protest on campus.

Jacobson said that the student is currently being held at the New Haven Police Department’s detention facility at 1 Union Ave., which is where they will have to spend the night, since the state judge in the case has ordered that the arrested student’s $10,000 bond can only be posted in court when they’re arraigned on Tuesday morning.

Craig Birckhead-Morton — a Yale undergraduate who was one of 48 people arrested by Yale police last Monday as university and city police cleared a pro-Palestinian tent encampment in Beinecke Plaza — told the Independent on Monday that he witnessed this afternoon’s arrest. He said that a handful of Yale police officers entered Harkness Hall and put a Yale-affiliated individual in handcuffs and then put them in the back of a Yale Police Department car.