In the hours, days and weeks after a group of student demonstrators entered Siemens Hall at about 4:25 p.m. on April 22 intent on bringing awareness to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Cal Poly Humboldt has consistently maintained they almost immediately began vandalizing the building and barricading its entrances, which is why police were summoned to the scene.

In official internal and external messaging, the university maintained that police had been called to the building — and then asked to clear it — because the situation had become “increasingly dangerous,” that “protesters had blocked exits” and that “vandalism of the building’s interior had already begun” before police arrived. In a sit-down interview with the North Coast Journal in the immediate aftermath of what became an eight-day hard occupation of the building that split the university community and prompted administration to institute a hard closure, threatening any students, faculty, staff or community members who set foot on campus with arrest, Chief of Staff Mark Johnson said he’d personally witnessed demonstrators barricading doors and vandalizing the building prior to police arrival.

“This wasn’t a peaceful protest,” he said. “This wasn’t an issue of free speech. This was an issue of lawless behavior that was premeditated.”

But body camera footage from the first officers on scene that afternoon tells a different story, showing a building undamaged and, with one exception, free of vandalism, with demonstrators seemingly willing to let people enter and exit as they pleased. The footage captured an employee in the president’s office saying the protesters “seem friendly” and Johnson himself dismissing any safety concerns associated with the protest.

“I don’t have any fears for my safety or anybody else’s safety,” the footage captured Johnson telling then Interim University Police Chief Peter Cress about 40 minutes after protesters first entered the building. “What I’m concerned about is not allowing that to take root anywhere in this building. They’re free to go out in the quad and voice their political opinion all day and all night as long as they’re not sleeping on campus property. But they’re not going to camp out in the administrative building on campus. … This is not a violent group. They’re just misguided.”

The Journal reached out to CPH’s marketing and communications office, seeking an explanation to the apparent disconnect between the university’s messaging and what the video footage showed…