NYPD Officer Fired Gun Inside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, Manhattan DA’s Office Confirms

An officer inside Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall Tuesday evening to break up a pro-Palestinian student demonstration fired his gun, in an incident that is now under review by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday evening.

The gun fired did not appear to be aimed at anyone and no one was injured, said Doug Cohen, a spokesperson for Bragg’s office confirmed in response to an inquiry from THE CITY, adding that the office’s Police Accountability Unit is reviewing the shooting, which it does as a matter of policy.

Cohen said no students and only police officers were in the immediate vicinity when the shooting occurred.

Four hours after an inquiry from THE CITY, a spokesperson for the NYPD confirmed the officer was attempting to navigate through an area barricaded by students while using a firearm “equipped with a flashlight” to illuminate his way when he shot his gun “accidentally.” The bullet struck a wall, and the spokesperson reiterated that the shooting occurred in the presence of police officers only.

Rumors of the shooting had quickly spread among students, but had not been confirmed until Thursday. A video posted to X by student Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine Tuesday night showed a police officer texting “thought we fucking shot someone.”

The gun discharge is the latest revelation about the highly militarized NYPD action to break up a Pro-Palestinian student demonstration at the campus that been going on since April 17.

In multiple television and radio appearances, as well as a press conference Wednesday morning, Mayor Eric Adams praised the NYPD’s “precision policing” and made no mention of the shooting.

During the raids at Columbia and City College, police blocked press access almost entirely, though they released a highly edited, flashy video of dozens of officers storming the Ivy League campus, breaking through barricaded doors and locks of the occupied hall, where demonstrators had barricaded themselves into early Tuesday morning.

In one shot, officers entered a room in Hamilton Hall with weapons drawn .

The video also shows officers using “flash-bangs,” or stun grenades.

“It’s pretty unusual to use flash-bangs for something like this absent some intel about a serious threat to officers,” said a veteran law-enforcement official.

“I’ve never seen them used for search warrants involving guns, let alone some barricaded college kids.”

Ben Chang, a spokesperson for Columbia University, declined to comment, deferring to the NYPD. A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams didn’t return a request for comment immediately.

‘A Military Operation’

Columbia University had first called police in to clear student demonstrators calling for the university to divest from Israel on April 18, with more than 100 arrests.

In the following days, as another even larger encampment of students grew in an adjacent lawn, sparking similar protests at universities nationwide, President Minouche Shafik expressed reluctance to involve police again.

That changed when a splinter group of demonstrators barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall early Tuesday morning, which she said gave the university “ no choice ” but to involve police again.

Even before the raids, Adams and other top NYPD officials had begun blaming “outside agitators” for fomenting protests on college campuses, with limited evidence to back that claim.

On Thursday evening, City Hall released a breakdown of those arrested in campus protests at Columbia and City College of New York it said were “unaffiliated” with those schools, saying those people, who the mayor has called “agitators,” accounted for nearly 30% of the 112 demonstrators arrested at Columbia and 60% of those arrested by City College.

Shayoni Mitra, a senior lecturer at Barnard College who met students upon their releases late Wednesday night into Thursday morning, relayed their accounts of being roughed up.

They said that included a student who was pushed down stairs not receiving medical attention for over an hour in the midst of what students described as something that “felt like a military operation,” and an account of an officer who “threw flash grenades across [a] barrier without any sense of how many were behind it including undergraduates.”

While the lesser charges most people were arrested on have to reach an arraignment within 24 hours under the city’s protocol, Cohen, the spokesperson for Bragg’s office, blamed the long delays on delays in arrest paperwork from the CUNY’s Department of Public Safety that the prosecutors needed before initiating the arraignments.

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