SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Youths arrested and detained for hours following a skateboarding event at Dolores Park last July told a federal judge Tuesday morning that San Francisco police had no probable cause for their arrest.
The juvenile plaintiffs of a suit against San Francisco and its police officers were arrested and detained after gathering to watch the annual Dolores Park Hill Bomb, where skateboarders fly down the steep hills at high speed.
The event was unsanctioned, and police in riot gear broke up the event after they say it turned violent, arresting 117 people, 83 of whom were minors. None of those arrested were charged with a crime.
The plaintiffs say they were merely bystanders who gathered to watch the event, and police did not allow them to leave the area around Dolores Park after the police ordered them to disperse, trapping them on 17th Street between Guerrero and Dolores Streets.
The plaintiffs filed a class action complaint in December, claiming that their First and Fourth Amendment rights to free speech and against unreasonable search and seizure were violated. The youths also brought Fourteenth Amendment race discrimination claims against the city since the vast majority of those arrested were Hispanic or Black.
After being arrested, the plaintiffs say they were left out in the cold in tight handcuffs and were not allowed to use the bathroom, and that the police violated their own policy by failing to check parents’ IDs or otherwise ensure that adults picking up children were authorized to do so.
Rachel Lederman argued on behalf of the plaintiffs Tuesday that the police should not be shielded by qualified immunity on the Fourth Amendment search and seizure claims because the plaintiffs were just bystanders watching the event.
“Merely being present at the scene of illegal activity doesn’t give probable cause to arrest bystanders,” Lederman told U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Cisneros, a Joe Biden appointee, at a motion to dismiss hearing Tuesday morning.
Zuzana Ikels of the San Francisco Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss the complaint. She argued that the plaintiffs were not arrested for watching the event, but were only detained hours later after they were told multiple times by police to disperse.
“They knew the party was an illegal and unpermitted party, they heard the police tell them to disperse and they were arrested almost two hours later,” Ikels said. “What they were arrested for was being on the streets and violating an order to disperse.”
Lederman argued that the plaintiffs were trying to leave the area, but police did not allow any entrance or exit into the Dolores Park area, and herded the crowds towards Guerrero Street before mass arresting all of them.
“The police simply boxed in everyone on the street. Didn’t allow anyone to leave. There was free ingress into the area, but no egress. This was simply an indiscriminate mass arrest without probable cause,” Lederman said.
Ikels said that the claims in the complaint are contradictory and do not support that interpretation of what happened, because many people at the event were able to leave the area freely.
“They were repeatedly told to disperse. They chose not to disperse, they chose to stay on the streets. A few of them decided not to, and then vandalized certain areas,” Ikels said.
Cisneros said that she thought the plaintiffs brought up legitimate Fourth Amendment concerns, and that is support in the complaint that the plaintiffs were trying to comply with police orders but were arrested anyways, or were given contradictory, confusing orders by police.
“I’ve got to take the allegations in the complaint as true. There’s other parts of the complaint that suggest they weren’t trying to disobey the order of dispersal,” Cisneros said.
Lederman replied that there was no question that the plaintiffs' Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the mass arrest.
“I think it’s clear that no access to bathrooms, no water, being held outdoors in cold weather, these are unreasonable conditions of confinement,” Lederman said.
Cisneros was less enthusiastic about the First and Fourteenth Amendment claims surviving, however.
The race discrimination claims, Cisneros said, were dubious because there wasn't proof that a group of entirely white youth would also not have been detained.
“I've got to scrutinize this under precedential requirements,” Cisneros said, and asked Lederman to find a similar case to help bolster the plaintiffs’ claims.
First Amendment claims might have trouble surviving as well, Cisneros said, because skateboarding is not a protected activity, therefore gathering to watch it is likely not protected.
Cisneros noted that she wasn’t aware of any other mass arrest case like this that had Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment claims proceed. She did not issue an order, but took the matter under submission.
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