Excerpt from SFist article
By Joe Kukura | Read the full story here.
Parents said they would sue over July’s draconian mass arrest of 117 people (83 of them minors) during this year’s Dolores Hill Bomb skateboarding meetup, and that lawsuit against the SFPD has now arrived.
SFist readers know that the annual guerrilla skateboarding event Dolores Hill Bomb will often get a little rowdy, but this past July’s event saw the mass arrest of 83 minors in addition to 32 people ages 18 and older. And yes, a Muni car was tagged, and one officer suffered a cut on the forehead. But it sure seemed heavy-handed that SFPD arrested 83 kids, some of whom they allegedly injured, over a matter where DA Brooke Jenkins dropped pretty much all of the charges anyway.
Some of the kids’ angry parents vowed to sue, and this has now come to pass. Mission Local reports that four of the arrested youngsters are named as the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit over the Dolores Hill Bomb arrests, in a suit brought by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
“These arrests and police conduct were unlawful and violated the youths’ constitutional rights,” Oakland-based PCJF senior counsel Rachel Lederman said in a Tuesday announcement. “Children and young adults were arrested, traumatized, and held for hours under inhumane conditions for merely participating in or happening to be near the youth skateboard event. They were kept waiting in the cold until the wee hours purely as an illegal dragnet to collect identifying information in a desperate attempt to justify the mass arrest.”
The full text of the 23-page lawsuit details how each of the four young plaintiffs was making seemingly innocent attempts to get home, but were swept up and detained by SFPD. And the lawsuit’s description of these children’s hours-long detention paints a disturbing picture of SFPD.
“Hours went by and Plaintiffs and other arrestees needed to urinate. Children implored the officers to allow them access to bathrooms but their requests were denied,” the lawsuit states. “Eventually, a sympathetic neighbor tossed a bucket down from her window. Some of the kids were able to urinate in the bucket or on the street. Others were forced to urinate in their pants, causing them shame, humiliation and embarrassment, and compounding their cold and discomfort.”