Body camera footage from the scene showed Capt. Sean Martin telling protesters he and fellow officers didn’t want to arrest anybody and that they supported the right to protest. But Martin also raised concerns about the encampment’s location and how the department received complaints from neighbors.

“You guys have been protesting all day,” Martin said around 1:30 a.m. “Listen, I get it and I support what you’re trying to do. … We were supposed to come down around 10 p.m., but we were looking to give you a space to let you all do this. But at a certain point, they have to go to work in the morning, as well. We’re trying to be reasonable with all them. We’re not trying to be unreasonable, I gave you guys several hours extra.”

Martin told the crowd that he was “free to answer any questions and speak to anybody who wants to speak to me.” The captain then finished, saying “We got to open up.”

That prompted a lead protester to start a “Free, free Palestine” chant. Martin is then heard telling an officer to initiate arrests.

The Berkeley Beacon, Emerson’s college student newspaper, posted in a live blog that the arrests began at 1:45 a.m., minutes after an officer was seen reading the city’s unlawful camping ordinance that bans individuals from setting up tents and tarps on public property.

“Boston is a city where upholding the right to protest is very important to us,” Mayor Michelle Wu told reporters at an unrelated morning event, “and we have many, many events and protests that occur in the city on a regular basis that take place without incident.

“Here,” she said, “we had been in communication with school officials and with the organizers and people on the ground as well that the tents in particular were posing a safety and health hazard, a fire hazard.”

The arrested protesters swarmed a fifth-floor hallway in Boston Municipal Court where they anticipated their arraignments just hours after they were cleared from the encampments. But the arraignments were pushed off until early next month because judges had been at a conference in the morning.

Attorney Antonio Viana, of the National Lawyers Guild, met with a small group of students in a side conference room before eight of them appeared in the courtroom and learned that they’d be released on personal recognizance and set to return to court in May.

“They were peacefully protesting until the Boston police came,” Viana told reporters in a court hallway. “I’ve heard in this court today people using expressions like ‘Antisemite’ and ‘future Hamas members.’ We do not benefit as a nation by labeling people who are out there expressing themselves.”

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