It is time now for the last word with my friend Lawrence O'Donnell.

Good evening Alex and I've been of course watching all of your coverage here and what we have seen on the video so far is actually the most organized and

comest and most professional police intervention we've ever seen on a college

campus. Now there's not a huge collection of those,

but there's enough beginning in 1968

to show how different this one is.

The 1968 version, those 700 arrested students,

were gleefully beaten by the NYPD.

In those days the police departments that were going into campuses were gleeful about the violence that they were visiting upon those anti-war

protesters and it was relentless and it was vicious and it was cruel and it was

extended to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where what

happened there was declared by the Commission who investigated a police

riot. That is not what we're seeing tonight. Our screen has been filled with what clearly do appear

to be Columbia students walking out calmly escorted by a police officer, both of whom the police

officer and the student, walking very calmly

to whatever that arrest destination is, what vehicle they're going to put those kids in and take

them where they're going.

So this so far is nothing like what we've seen

in the previous dramatic and violent interventions

by police departments in the past on campuses. It could get worse. We could get an

after action report that indicates that really rough things went on there, but so

far there hasn't been even the slightest hint of violence in what we've seen tonight.

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