Excerpt from NBC News.
By Marlene Lenthang | Read the full story here.
Every year, throngs of youths descend upon San Francisco’s Mission District for a skateboarding event, but this year festivities ended in chaos with police arresting over 100 young people — some as young as 13 — and leaving them in the streets with no food, water or chance to use the bathroom for hours, a new lawsuit claim.
By evening, more than 100 San Francisco Police Department officers descended upon the event, sealed off the streets and “corralled and trapped” the crowd without “giving notice, warning, or opportunity to disperse,” The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), which filed the suit, said in a news release.
That’s a violation of police’s crowd control policy which demands that there be “time to disperse,” and an announcement of “a safe, clear route” for people to exit, the suit filed in the Northern District of California on Tuesday said.
In total, 113 young people were arrested — 81 of them minors.
The children were ordered to sit and wait outdoors in cold temperatures for up to 7 ½ hours, were handcuffed, and not given any food, water, blankets or warm clothing and were not allowed to be returned to the hordes of parents who showed up worried about their children, the PCJF said.