Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

NYPD Used High-Tech Surveillance to Find Gaza Paint Splatter Protester, Docs Show

Throwing paint on a statue at Columbia seems like a minor crime, but cops use tremendous resources when pro-Palestine protesters are in the crosshairs.

Columbia University had just resumed classes for the first time since a major crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations roiled campus throughout the first half of 2024.

Seeking to highlight ties between Columbia University and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the campus protest movement had culminated in a building occupation that ended with dozens of arrests, sparking activism on campuses across the country. At Columbia, classes went virtual or used a hybrid model.

On the day classes resumed their regular scheduling in September, one protester splattered the university’s famous Alma Mater statue in red paint.

Following the incident, New York Police Department investigators deployed an extensive array of high-tech surveillance and investigative tools to identify the alleged vandal, according to documents from the court case provided exclusively to The Intercept. Police leveraged networks of surveillance cameras and facial recognition software to pinpoint a suspect.

In July 2025, Jakhi Isaiah, a New Jersey-based activist whose legal last name is McCray, was charged for the incident.

As the nationwide protest movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza became a national lightening rod and the Trump administration began to throw its weight against activists, authorities at all levels began to expend tremendous resources against pro-Palestine demonstrators. Using intensive surveillance tools in response to relatively minor crimes became typical in cases against pro-Palestine protesters.

“It deliberately sends a very chilling message that you better not dissent.”

“It deliberately sends a very chilling message that you better not dissent.”

“I think it deliberately sends a very chilling message that you better not dissent,” said Bina Ahmad, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney has represented pro-Palestine protesters but is not working on Isaiah’s case. “How many [resources] they used for such a small charge kind of says they will go to any length to grab who they want to grab and charge what they want to charge.”

The documents obtained by The Intercept also detail how NYPD investigators appeared to have abandoned the case, before being spurred to reopen it by federal officials. Both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service, according to the documents, were participating in a separate federal investigation into Isaiah.

Columbia claimed that the paint protest had caused thousands of dollars in damage to the statue, but maintenance crews were able to clean it up almost immediately. Photographs taken by students show that, by the end of the day, all the paint had had been removed.

The hunt for the alleged vandal soon got underway.

In the days following the incident, NYPD detectives used 21 different camera angles and tracked the person that they allege is Isaiah as he moved both........

© The Intercept