Supervisor Jackie Fielder has sent a second letter of inquiry to the San Francisco Police Department, asking for more information on its choice to deploy officers in riot gear to arrest several individuals at Trans March and Stud Alley on June 26 and 27.
Fielder is requesting more details about the types of officers deployed to both events, and whether those officers were on overtime or regular hours. Fielder also requested drone footage “of the 22-minute window of active enforcement at Trans March, between 7:40pm and 8:02pm,” and — if that was not available — “the number of officers that participated in the 22 minute window of active enforcement.”
Twenty-six people in total were arrested over Pride weekend this year: six at Trans March on charges of vandalism, and 20 the next evening at the so-called Stud Alley party on charges of unlawful assembly and resisting arrest. Those arrests — and dramatic videos of the officers making them — have raised questions as to the size and scale of SFPD’s response.
In response to Fielder’s initial letter of inquiry, Chief of Police Derrick Lew rejected Fielder’s description of SFPD’s response as “clashing with residents and visitors participating in Pride activities.”
Lew instead described SFPD’s behavior at Trans March as the outcome of an effort to arrest several people who had been spotted using Super Soaker-style water guns filled with paint to spray-paint buildings and private security cameras. “A Department drone helped track two vandalism suspects to the area of Turk and Taylor Streets, capturing footage of them placing the water guns into a paper bag, discarding the bag on the sidewalk, and removing their outer clothing and face coverings in an apparent attempt to blend back into the crowd of law-abiding marchers,” Lew wrote.
“When officers moved to detain the two suspects,” Lew continued, they were blocked from doing so by a crowd “estimated at roughly 300 people” that linked arms, chanted for the suspects’ release, and threw glass bottles. “As officers attempted to place the two detained individuals into a patrol car, one person climbed onto the roof of the vehicle and was pulled down by officers, and another forced open the rear door in an attempt to free the suspects, while others pushed officers back.”
“Given the size and intensity of the crowd, additional officers were called in,” Lew concluded.
Lew’s response did not answer questions from Fielder, such as what the total number of officers deployed to the scene of both events was. He stated only that “Pride Command” at the Southern Station was staffed with “approximately 24 personnel (three sergeants and 21 officers)” the evening of Trans March, and that SFPD does “not have a complete count of the number of officers who responded to the Stud Alley incident.”
In her second letter, Fielder quoted extensively from a letter from Rainbow Families Action, a group for parents of trans and gender-expansive youth, some of whom were present at the Trans March.
The letter described parents who were there with their children seeing, “A large pack of police officers came charging past us, weapons drawn and with a terrifying enough urgency that one officer fell. Police cars raced down streets filled with marchers who dove to the sidewalks. We couldn’t see where they were headed, and started to fear the worst. The Pulse massacre anniversary echoed in our heads … We were terrified. Our kids were terrified.”
Fielder’s letters of inquiry come as part of a larger push for answers about SFPD’s deployment of officers over Pride Weekend. In the three weeks since the initial arrests, there have been protests, petitions, and community meetings.
A letter with demands for change circulated by the organizers of the Trans March received more that 1,500 signatures, which organizers presented to the mayor’s office on Monday.
At a police commission meeting on July 8, seats were packed with people wrapped in pride flags and holding signs with slogans like “Cops out of Pride” and “SFPD = Waste.” The meeting lasted nearly three hours as participants filed up to speak at public comment. Over and over, people asked what happened.
“Why were officers pointing rifles at a peaceful legal gathering? There were children there after all,” one person asked. “How is this making our community safer?”
Trans March tied to Compton’s Cafeteria 60 years earlier
When Jace Ritchey, one of the marchers at Trans March this year, neared the intersection of Turk and Taylor on June 26, 2026, they were expecting to see dancing.
For years, Ritchey has attended the march without fail. This year, there were rumors that something special was going to happen. “There were whispers about it.” Ritchey said. “There was going to be a performance with dancing and music off the side of a building — like a literally off the walls performance.”
In August of 1966, 60 years ago, the Compton’s Cafeteria riots began at that same intersection, changing the course of history in San Francisco. The riots, in response to the harassment and arrest of trans people dining at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria for the crime of “female impersonation,” occurred three years before the Stonewall riots, in what historian Susan Stryker called the “first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment.” To commemorate the anniversary, march-goers this year were awaiting something special.
The performance didn’t happen. Instead, as the protest neared its end, SFPD officers entered the crowd in an attempt to detain several people. In the letter, Lew writes that SFPD had identified the people that they sought to arrest through drone footage, but also wrote that the suspects had already discarded the Super Soakers they were using to spray cameras and buildings and tried to melt back into the crowd — meaning that it was unlikely that the crowd knew why SFPD officers had suddenly marched into their midst.
“I started to hear screaming and shouting,” said Renee Coe, another march goer, at a rally outside of City Hall on Monday. “I saw that a squad car had driven into the crowd. In the middle of the crowd I saw dozens of police officers in full riot gear hitting people.”
“The arrests in both incidents involved a small number of people out of many thousands who attended these events peacefully,” Lew wrote.
But for those attending the march, the distinction didn’t feel quite as clear.
“People began to flee for their safety and the consensus was that the Trans March was being shut down, and there would be a mass arrest,” Ritchey said. “We were there to learn about and commemorate this event from 60 years ago, and suddenly we were living it.”
In total, six people were arrested at Trans March for charges of felony vandalism, conspiracy, obstructing a peace officer, and battery on a peace officer.
The next evening, on Saturday, June 27, a large crowd gathered downtown for the “Stud Alley” party on Kissling Street. The informal gathering had become large and well-known enough that some of the original attendees had tried to cancel it, “We’re starting to feel that the alley has outgrown itself,” they wrote in a post on Indybay. “Each year it gets bigger, more people show up and not all of them share our dreams.”
The first two arrests occurred around 10 p.m., when two participants were arrested. The party reformed on nearby Washburn Street, which one participant described as “bigger and a lot more energetic.”
Video footage shows officers forming a line on Howard Street between Ninth and Washburn streets, where the party was allegedly taking place. Many participants allege that they heard no dispersal orders before the line advanced into the alley.
Nikki Caballero, who was at both locations of the party, says that she did not hear any dispersal orders at the second gathering. “They had given no warning,” Caballero said. “I’ve been to protests and marches before and I know that usually the police will give a dispersal order before they try to do a mass arrest,” Caballero said.
“I saw people getting swung on,” Caballero recalled. “One young feminine person got thrown to the ground and dragged by her ponytail.”
“I know from the outside it looks like just a dumb street rave, but it really does mean a lot to a lot of people,” another participant said, who preferred to remain anonymous. “That is the most violence I’ve ever seen at one of these parties. That’s the most people I’ve ever seen getting hurt”
SFPD has been accused of heavy-handed policing in situations like this before, including at several anti-ICE protests last summer. But the department’s response has, for some, brought back memories of when police officers openly harassed and arrested queer people. “The minute I saw the press reports, I began thinking of the parallels historically and the ways in which these actions reflect long standing, deep seated institutional challenges with the SFPD,” said Gerard Koskovich, a queer public historian.
What stood out particularly, said Koskovich, was the intensity of SFPD’s response to a relatively low-level offense. “Spray painting a building is not going to harm anybody physically, right? It is not an activity that justifies police violence as a response, and police violence includes things like using pepper spray, using nightsticks, physically, violently arresting people.”
Koskovich cited events like the Halloween crackdown of 1979 and the Castro Sweep in 1989, where minor infractions provoked massive police crackdowns.
“The past isn’t over,” Koskovich said. “It’s still present and reproducing itself.”
