Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A lone Trash can lay on its side at the intersection of W. 139th St and Amsterdam Ave in Harlem, in front of the gates of the City College of New York.
At around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, this was the extent of damaged property that I witnessed outside the college campus. At the same time, New York Police Department officers in riot regalia had amassed in their hundreds, including members of the Strategic Response Group — a unit dedicated to public unrest and “counterterrorism.”
More police had stormed through the school’s neo-Gothic gates less than an hour before, at the behest of the college’s president, to arrest protesting students en masse.
Twenty blocks south, police had locked down and…