Police Shot Them in the Head With Rubber Bullets. Now UCLA Gaza Protesters Are Suing.

Police conspired to violently attack anti-genocide protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles last year, according to a suit filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court. 

At the height of the school’s encampment against Israel’s war on Gaza last spring, one of hundreds across the country, a mob of pro-Israel protesters attacked pro-Palestine protesters for more than four hours. On the night of April 30, 2024, police stood by and watched as counter-protesters aimed and shot fireworks, sprayed chemical agents, harassed, and sexually assaulted pro-Palestine protesters, students and faculty alleged last month in a separate, ongoing lawsuit. 

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The day after the melee, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, UCLA administrators, and seven different law enforcement agencies laid plans to dismantle the school’s encampment for good. 

UCLA invited multiple outside police forces to campus to clear the encampments on May 1. More than 700 police officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol, the University of California Police Department, and private security were on campus the night of the raid. 

Protesters are now suing the state of California, which oversees California Highway Patrol, and the city of Los Angeles, which oversees the LAPD, for violence against the demonstrations. The police fired more than 50 rounds of rubber bullets at protesters, striking several people in the head; some of the injuries sent demonstrators to the hospital.

The projectiles shattered bones in one student’s hand and required her to undergo surgery and extensive rehab. Another person, who police shot in the head, was diagnosed with internal bleeding. (The governor’s office referred questions to California Highway Patrol. CHP and LAPD said they would not comment on pending legislation. UCLA did not respond to a request for comment.)

“If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California.”

A lawyer for the protesters said it was important to hold Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, often mentioned as possible future party leaders, to account because, though the governing authorities are Democrats, their actions against the protesters helped give rise to Donald Trump’s extreme crackdown.

“These attacks also happened in Democratic-run cities and blue states,” said attorney Ricci Sergienko, who filed the suit on Thursday. “That is a clear, direct path to what’s happening now with Trump, because the Democratic Party and their leaders made enemies out of these young people.” 

“If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California,” Sergienko said. “We want to talk about what fascism is, and authoritarian repression and suppression — that is modeled here in California.”

Rules on Rubber Bullets

The new lawsuit says police violated that law and protesters’ rights under the state constitution when they attacked people at the encampment last May. 

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After protests against police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, police took heavy criticism for repeatedly shooting protesters with rubber or foam bullets, even losing a major lawsuit over the issue. Agencies like the LAPD and LA Sheriff’s Department faced injunctions restricting the use of weapons like rubber bullets — also known as 40-millimeter kinetic impact projectiles. 

In California, lawmakers responded by passing a law that prohibited officers from using the projectiles against protests unless the situation presented an objective, reasonable defense against a threat to life or serious injury. 

In the wake of the 2020 protests, UCLA also changed its guidelines to prioritize deescalation tactics and minimize use of outside police forces on campus. 

California Highway Patrol, on the other hand, responds less frequently to protests and was not accused of using similar weapons in 2020. CHP officers nonetheless stormed UCLA encampments last spring and fired more than 50 rounds of the kinetic impact projectiles, said Becca Brown, another attorney working on the lawsuit. 

“LAPD did it as well, but they did not use them quite as heavily as CHP,” Brown said. 

The new California law restricts the indiscriminate use of rubber bullets into a crowd because they can be — and have been — deadly, Brown explained. 

“They cannot be used indiscriminately,” she said. “They cannot be used simply because someone is non-compliant.” 

Following criticism, police offered justifications for the use of force in some cases, according to an LAPD after-action report on the agency’s response to the UCLA encampments. Examples included someone throwing a traffic cone at police or removing an officer’s helmet. 

The report offered several recommendations for the LAPD, including proper reporting of use-of-force incidents and the need for clear commands from police leaders. The report called on the police to improve communication between agencies because LAPD officers “did not appear to have a clear understanding of their mission.” 

Plaintiffs in the suit include a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, an undergraduate student, another college student, and an architectural designer. Police shot all three of them with rubber bullets and hit several of them in the head. 

The police attack on the protests has had effects beyond the physical, the complaint says, and has caused plaintiffs to reconsider exercising their First Amendment rights to demonstrate against Israel’s war on Gaza. The protesters are also concerned that if they participate in future protests, they’ll be subject to further attacks from the state and police. 

“The encampment clearance by means of violence, excessive force, and kinetic energy projectiles traumatized Plaintiffs, chilled their protest activity, and justifiably made them less willing to engage in any further Palestine-related protest activity,” the complaint says. “This was the natural consequence of the dramatic and violent clearing organized and carried out by CHP and LAPD, which would have certainly chilled any ordinary person from engaging in Palestine solidarity advocacy in the future.” 

One plaintiff, UCLA Ph.D. candidate Abdullah Puckett, “has become more hesitant and afraid of continuing his participation in protests,” the complaint said. “He now feels that he must reconsider whether he can participate in protests and if so, to what extent he can participate. He now fears that he will experience violent retaliation at the hands of law enforcement if he participates in protests.”

UCLA Gaza Crackdown

Police arrested more than 200 people as a result of the UCLA encampment. The LAPD, which had a $3.2 billion budget last year, sought more than half a million dollars in reimbursement from the governor’s office for the response, in part for more than 2,400 overtime hours, the Daily Bruin reported.

“How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe?”

Arrested students wound up with criminal records. Those records are now being used by the Trump administration to target students for abduction and deportation.

“For international students that may have been arrested at any of these encampments, they then had that on their record, which led to the Trump administration running background checks on international students,” said Sergienko, the lawyer. “And if they had gotten arrested at an encampment, that got flagged and could be subject to deportation under Trump’s fascist policies.” 

California’s Democratic lawmakers are now pushing for a bill that amounts to an “educational gag order” targeting ethnic studies classes over concerns about antisemitism. 

“That’s another attack on speech coming from the blue state, the liberal paradise of California,” Sergienko said. 

“A real question is, how are students supposed to feel safe on campus knowing that the administration would call in a thousand school shooters to come attack them while on campus?” Sergienko said. “How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe? 

On Wednesday night, UCLA students showed “The Encampments,” a documentary released earlier this year. The school called in the LAPD to break up the screening. Police arrested three students.

Update: May 5, 2025, 10:53 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include responses to requests for comment received after publication from the Los Angeles Police Department and the California Highway Patrol.

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