The San Francisco city attorney’s office will go before a judge next week and ask her to toss out the claims from four teenagers that the police department violated their civil rights during the July 2023 Dolores Park hill bomb.
The lawsuits from the teenagers could be deemed a class action and, if so, the move by the city attorney could cost 113 young people recompense for hours spent detained outside and in the cold, zip-tied by police officers in what plaintiffs allege was an unconstitutional, arbitrary mass arrest.
“We have to defend the police department’s ability to appropriately and legally control a crowd and to maintain public safety,” said Jen Kwart, the city attorney’s spokesperson. “The crowd that remained blocking the city streets was briefly detained, cited, and released, in accordance with the law.”
That Saturday, July 8, several teenagers urinated into a bucket while held on the street, and were kept by officers sitting or standing for hours without food or water. Others allegedly wet themselves and suffered panic attacks when transferred to a nearby police station, and many complained their zip ties cut off circulation. Parents, arriving in a panic, were kept separated from their children.
The majority of those arrested were teenagers, and 81 of them minors.
Despite the mass arrest, all but two of those caught in the police kettle saw their charges dismissed by the district attorney and juvenile department for lack of evidence.
“I have to say that I’m a bit surprised that they’re taking as aggressive an approach as they are, given how this mass arrest was just blatantly illegal,” said Rachel Lederman, a longtime protest attorney and senior counsel at the Partnership for Civil Rights Fund who is representing three teenagers — a 13-year-old and two 16-year-olds — in a class-action lawsuit filed against the city in December.
“But the city attorney is showing all indications of defending it to the death,” she said.
The lawsuit alleges that officers involved directly in the hill bomb arrest, along with top police brass — Police Chief William Scott, Mission Station Captain Thomas Harvey, and Lieutenant Matt Sullivan — violated the plaintiffs’ civil rights by unlawfully targeting them for arrest without cause, and holding them in conditions that violated department policy. A fourth teenager, 15, filed a separate suit in March, alleging similar violations.
City Attorney David Chiu has asked a federal judge to toss out both lawsuits and strike the “class action” categorization. Judge Lisa Cisneros will consider Chiu’s arguments and the teens’ counters at a hearing on April 30.
In the motion to dismiss, filed in February but being considered next week, Chiu describes the crowds as “large packs roving around the neighborhood.”
“They set off fireworks, igniting fires in Dolores Park. Some people shot guns. Others assaulted and threatened officers with broken bottles,” the motion read. “The neighborhood was terrified. To quell the chaos, police officers were deployed to restore order and detained individuals until peace was reestablished.”
Lederman, for her part, said the city’s motion was filled with “misinformation and exaggeration,” and that the city is attempting to discredit her clients.
“The police didn’t have any information that the 113 people they surrounded and arrested had committed any crimes, but the city is ignoring that and trying to paint this dramatic picture of these youth and children as criminals that had to be arrested,” she added.
The motion also argues that several of the claims are legally unsound, and that the plaintiffs were “unharmed” by the police response.
On July 8, 2023, more than 100 police officers erected barricades around Dolores Park and descended on the area to stop the annual skateboarding “hill bomb,” in which skaters typically race downhill over several steep blocks of Dolores Street.
The event has in the past led to serious injuries, a knife fight, and a death, and the city moved last year to stop it entirely.
But it did not advertise that fact ahead of time, and hundreds of skaters and spectators — the bulk of them teenagers — arrived at Dolores Park that day for the hill bomb. When dozens began skating downhill in spite of the police barricades, officers gave dispersal orders and pushed crowds block to block.
Many in the crowd reacted by throwing glass bottles at the police and vandalizing nearby buses and a tram; one officer was sliced on the forehead, allegedly by a 15-year-old girl’s nail when the officer and others arrested her teenaged boyfriend.
Harvey, then the newly arrived Mission captain, moved to make arrests after the laceration. Police chased crowds away from the park, and several lines of officers encircled one particular group of 113 young skaters, spectators and passers-by on 17th Street. Officers detained them for hours on the street, zip-tying and photographing them one by one before transferring them two blocks to Mission Station for fingerprinting and processing.
They were released throughout the early morning to a gaggle of anxious parents; the last child left the station at 4:15 a.m.
The operation was the largest mass arrest of teenagers in San Francisco since at least 2017, according to the police chief, and the largest arrest generally in the city since at least the George Floyd protests in 2020. A total of 117 people were arrested; 113 of them in the kettling operation, and four earlier in the day.
The district attorney’s office said that at least seven people were charged with various crimes stemming from that day, and several convicted. It is unclear if any of those charged or convicted were part of the 113 arrested en masse, but none are the named plaintiffs.
“We don’t dispute that some unknown people spray-painted the streetcar and the officer’s face did get scratched by a young girl,” said Lederman. But, Lederman said, those earlier acts of assault and vandalism were immaterial to the police kettling action, which targeted a large group without making “individual determinations” as to their probable guilt.
“They just made a decision to arrest everyone who was on the street in that general area, so whether somebody did something wrong at some earlier point in a different location is not really relevant to whether the arrest was legal,” she said.
Adanté Pointer, a civil rights attorney representing the teenager in the separate suit, called the city attorney’s response a “scorched-earth position” and said the office was acting like an “attack dog.”
“Instead of the city doing right by the citizens caught up in this fiasco, it’s taking the approach that, ‘We want to bludgeon folks,’” he said.
“doing right by the citizens caught up in this fiasco”
I wonder how many taxpayer dollars Pointer believes would constitute “doing right” here. Talk about bludgeoning.
I’ve been seeing a few more police cars on the streets lately. Maybe their strike is over? But I still don’t see them outside their cars unless they are in riot gear or in large swarms.
Amen, Mathew,
If you want a return of Foot Patrols and Kobans in San Francisco you’re going to have to pass a Ballot Measure taking control of the choice for Police Chief away from the Mayor and put it into the hands of Voters.
Presently, the Mayor through Police Commissioner Debra Walker is attempting to close down the last of the Patrol Specials whose very raison d’etre is walking Foot Patrols.
Voters should be offered the opportunity to approve taking 300 of those empty SFPD slots and giving them to Patrol Specials as as their own Division by Charter and give them the positions the SFPOA will only staff with …
Every CBD’s Security Force should be Patrol Specials.
Thanks for the lob at the net.
h.
I hope the kids and the parents that are suing are chastised in some way for their behavior! The kids need to do community service at the least & told to listen to people of authority. The police did the right thing by trying to contain a crazy situation.
No Kathy, you have no idea what happened if this is what you think. Many of these kids were on their way home, kettled and arrested for NOTHING. That is nonsense
I hope the judge tells them NO, NO and NO. These arrests were ridiculous, and heavy handed and totally unnecessary. I hope the judge tosses the city attorney out of the courtroom.
The stories of how these children, yes children, were treated and their parents trying to release them is horrifying. We need to look at London Breed and her attorney closely and think again.
skateboarding is not a crime.
acab
Joe,
Key points here are that the entire operation was planned and executed with the intent of “making lots of arrests” according to a Captain who was standing apart from the crowd watching.
And, the Chief initially said that he had no part in the Planning of this massive action.
As for Chiu, this guy and his company, ‘Grassroots Enterprises’ created training materials for the Top Staff Volunteers for George W. Bush in 2000 for $350,000 and excused it as just another job they’d do for anyone.
Chiu probably had more to do with Bush’s win than Nader’s Green Party ticket.
Go Niners !!
h.