Should a jury decide if San Francisco police violated the civil rights of 117 people, mostly children and teenagers, arrested during the 2023 Dolores Hill Bomb?
Or should a federal judge resolve the class action lawsuit they have filed against the city, police department, and several individual officers who detained them that night?
The plaintiffs want a jury trial. The city’s attorneys want Judge Lisa Cisneros to deliver a summary judgement, which would speed up the costly legal proceedings.
In order to avoid a jury, both parties need to be in agreement on the facts of the case.
“All the facts are contested,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Rachel Lederman told the court today. One of those facts: Did police need to individually determine that each person they detained intended to commit a crime?
The plaintiffs allege that officers did not appropriately assess who was and wasn’t a threat, and instead indiscriminately rounded up bystanders who happened to be near the popular, albeit verboten, annual skateboarding event by a busy intersection. They claim they were detained for hours in “abusive” conditions without probable cause.
“It wasn’t hard to tell who was involved,” countered City attorney Reilly Stoler. Officers did not need to make decisions to arrest one-by-one because they believed those detained were acting as an unlawfully assembled group, he argued.
Police officers in the United States receive “qualified immunity” that shields them from liability even when they make mistaken, but “reasonable,” judgement calls in the line of duty.
After police issued multiple orders to disperse, “a stubborn faction of the crowd refused to leave, caused mayhem, and were lawfully arrested,” Jen Kwart, the city attorney’s spokesperson, wrote in a statement. “The Police Department must have the ability to control a violent crowd in order to maintain public safety.”
The night in question
Around 7:15 p.m. on July 8, 2023, officers told a 200-person crowd gathered at Dolores Park to disperse.
Violence had broken out, Stoler said. Members of the group “peppered” officers with glass bottles and fireworks, and one officer was “stabbed in the head,” he said. Police reported at the time that a 15-year-old girl cut the forehead of a sergeant who was arresting a 16-year-old boy. It’s unclear what specific charges the girl was charged with later.
The group moved, Stoler said: Officers tracked the young people to the intersection of Church and 18th streets, where there’s a Muni line.
An hour later, two trains were vandalized, and the group was again told to disperse or risk arrest. Around 8:15 p.m., officers formed a line and moved south down Dolores Street, video shows.
The judge asked how passersby caught in the fray would have known where to go. They should have stopped running from police and left the area, Stoler responded.
Leaving the area wasn’t an option, Lederman said: Kids started running because officers pointed their batons and less-lethal crowd control weapons at them. According to the lawsuit, by 8:35 p.m., the moving line of police had effectively “trapped” bystanders on 17th street between Dolores and Guerrero streets. They were told to get on the ground.
Those actions by police forced youth in the area to form the so-called group, Lederman argued. She cited testimony from a couple of teenage girls who said they followed officers’ directions to go north, only to be rounded up by the line of officers moving south.
Attorneys for both sides also debated the plaintiffs’ claim that they were held in the cold for hours, contrary to state regulations. Some teens said they were forced to urinate on the street without access to a bathroom.
Such regulations only apply to people being held in detention facilities, Stoler said.
Police “deliberately evaded” those regulations by keeping the detained teenagers outside and on buses, Lederman responded. The youth were transported by bus to the Mission Police Station, which, Cinseros pointed out, was only a block away.
These maneuvers were appropriate because safely detaining and processing 117 people is a “huge logistical process,” Stoler said. Walking the group to the station would have meant chaining teenagers together, he added.
Youth under arrest were not read their rights until 9:18 p.m., over half an hour after they were encircled on the street at 8:41 p.m., the judge said. Was there still reason to detain them then?
Yes, Stoler argued. Lederman balked.
During that time, she said, at least 17 children and parents told officers that they were bystanders who had no idea why they were under arrest. While officers don’t have to believe someone who says they’re innocent, that should have raised alarms that there was no probable cause to detain them, Lederman said.
Probable cause must be determined individual by individual, or, in this case, “kid by kid,” Emilly Zhu, a legal fellow at the ACLU of northern California, wrote in a press statement. Or else the arrests are “guilt by association.”
The judge’s decision about whether to issue a judgement or take the case to a jury could come anytime in the following months.
